The vanguard has arrived in the clinical laboratory: array-based karyotyping for prognostic markers in chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

摘要

Nuclear and mitotic abnormalities have been a hallmark of human cancer since the late 19th century when they were first described by German pathologists. However, the ability to visualize chromosome structures within these abnormal nuclei has only been possible since the middle of the 20th century when "squash and smear" cytogenetic techniques were adopted for analysis of malignant tissues. Despite the low resolution of these crude methods, comparison of the chromosomes in malignant cells with those of healthy cells revealed them to be both morphologically and numerically abnormal even before the correct homo sapiens chromosome number was determined in 1956. With the advent of chromosome banding techniques In the early 1970s, recurrent and tumor-specific chromosome abnormalities could be accurately identified in malignant cells and these recurrent aberrations have provided insight into the mechanisms of tu-morigenesis as well as clinically applicable prognostic disease markers. Despite these decades of progress, the universal application of chromosome analysis in clinical oncology has been hampered by the difficulty involved In obtaining metaphases from most types of tumor cells in the laboratory and the relatively low resolution of chromosome banding techniques even when metaphases are successfully obtained.