ABSTRACT
There has been considerable progress in recent years in the management of malignant disease in general, but in no other area has the progress been quite as remarkable as in the management of chronic myeloid leukemia. People have seen the disease move from a status where chemotherapy changed the natural history little if at all to a time when selected patients could be treated and often “cured” by allogeneic stem cell transplantation. Despite the fact that there is a general agreement that the pattern of gene expression may differ substantially according to the phase of disease, it has proved more difficult to identify genes differentially expressed in patients who respond and patients who do not respond well to imatinib, but one recent study has shown that patients who relapse after initial response to imatinib mesylate have a gene expression profile more closely resembling advanced phase than chronic phase disease.
