Most patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) enter complete
remission (CR) after treatment with chemotherapy, but a large
number of them experience relapse with resistant disease. To identify
genes that are associated with their prognoses, we analyzed gene
expression in 54 pediatric patients with AML using an oligonucleotide
microarray that contained 12 566 probe sets. A supervised approach
using the Student t test selected a prognostic set of 35 genes,
some of which are associated with the regulation of cell cycle
and apoptosis. Most of these genes had not previously been reported
to be associated with prognosis and were not correlated with morphologically
classified French-American-British (FAB) subtypes or with karyotypes.
These results indicate the existence of prognosis-associated genes
that are independent of cell lineage and cytogenetic abnormalities,
and they can provide therapeutic direction for individual risk-adapted
therapy for pediatric AML patients.