The Expression Patterns of APC2 and APC7 in Newly Diagnosed Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a heterogeneous type of disease that is currently categorized based on cell morphology, immunophenotype, genetic abnormalities and gene expression pattern. Although these classifications are valuable in the determination of patient’s survival and treatment intensity, the response of patients to treatment and subsequently their survival are highly different, even in each subtype. So searching for new molecules involved in the leukemogenesis, disease progression, treatment resistance or candidate targets for therapy are critically sensed. APC/C is a multi-subunit E3 ligase that has essential role in metaphase progression and seems to be essentially involved in tumorgenesis and cancer progression. We analyzed the expression of APC2 and APC7 gene as two key subunits of this complex in 57 newly diagnosed ALL patients with quantitative RT-PCR. APC2 and APC7 were significantly over-expressed in 33 (57.9%) and 38 (66.7%) of patients respectively (P value of 0.014 and 0.009) using two-tailed Student’s t tests. This over expression was independent of cellular, immunological and molecular factors. APC/C promotes cell proliferation, a feature related to tumorgenesis and also poor prognosis in cancers such as ALL, so the determination of the pattern of APC/C subunits gene expression may help to better understand molecular basic underlying cancer and also new prognostic marker and new targets for therapy in ALL patients.