Early-detection, diagnosis and monitoring of malignant lymphoma/leukemia.

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There are various kinds of hematopoietic malignancies including lymphoma and leukemia. There is wide range of spectrum in terms of prognosis. Some of them are very aggressive and hard to control. Others show slightly well prognosis. In many cases, relapse will occur after the regression of tumor cells with the treatments of chemotherapy, x-irradiation or immuno-therapy etc., if only a small number of tumor cells could survive. In order to prevent relapse and induce complete remission, development of highly sensitive, specific technology to detect tumor cells is urgently required.We found highly frequent gene silencing of specific genes with DNA hyper-methylation in hematopoietic malignancies. Especially, we found that some type of malignant lymphoma/leukemia show specific changes of methylation profiles and also CpG island methylator phenotype (CIMP) in accordance with the progression. In the basis of these findings, we developed a new highly sensitive, specific system to detect hematopoietic malignancies. It will be useful for the early-detection, diagnosis and monitoring of malignant lymphoma/leukemia.