Genetics-based disease predictions for chronic blood cancers

11 October, Cambridge – Scientists have developed a successful method to make truly personalised predictions of future disease outcomes for patients with certain types of blood cancers. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was a collaboration between the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, the University of Cambridge and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI).

By combining extensive genetic and clinical information, the researchers predicted the prognosis for patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs). This personalised method outperformed all current schemes available to make disease predictions and had the additional advantage of giving patient-specific predictions, rather than simply classifying patients into broad risk categories.

This work could lead to personalised medicine for patients with these blood cancers. It will help doctors identify those patients who are likely to have a very good future outlook, and which patients may benefit from specific treatments or clinical trials.

“We’re often baffled by the genetic diversity between patients with the same type of leukaemia,” explains Moritz Gerstung, Research Group Leader at EMBL-EBI and paper author. “This study is a shining example of how this diversity can be translated into patient-specific predictions about disease outcomes. These predictions are based on 63 genetic and clinical variables, which require new statistical models to quantify the combined consequences of patient parameters, and to calculate the likelihood of different possible outcomes for each individual. We believe that such models, based on knowledge banks of large patient cohorts, have the potential to underpin patient management for a number of different types of leukaemia and solid cancers.”

To find out more, read the original press release on the Wellcome Sanger Institute website.