Overexpression of BAALC: clinical significance in Chinese de novo acute myeloid leukemia.

To investigate the expression of brain and acute leukemia, cytoplasmic (BAALC) and analyze its clinical significance in Chinese de novo acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Real-time quantitative PCR (RQ-PCR) was carried out to detect BAALC transcript level in 121 de novo AML patients and 41 normal controls. BAALC transcript level in AML patients was significantly up-regulated compared with normal controls (P < 0.001). Patients with high BAALC expression had significantly older age than those with low BAALC expression (P = 0.021). The percentage of blasts in bone marrow of the BAALC high-expressed patients was significantly higher than that in the low-expressed patients (P < 0.001). The incidence of BAALC overexpression was significantly higher in M0/M1 (8/9, 89 %) and M2 subtypes (33/48, 68 %) than in M3 subtype (6/27, 22 %) (P < 0.001). The frequency of IDH1/2 wild type in CN-AML patients with high BAALC expression was significantly higher than those with low BAALC expression (P = 0.031). BAALC high-expressed patients had a significantly lower complete remission than low-expressed patients in both entire AML cohort and CN-AML (P = 0.013 and 0.029, respectively). Furthermore, both whole AML cohort and CN-AML patients with high BAALC expression showed a shorter overall survival than those with low BAALC expression (P = 0.002 and 0.008, respectively). Multivariate analysis confirmed high BAALC expression as an independent adverse prognostic factor in both AML and CN-AML patients. Our study indicates that overexpression of BAALC serves as an independent prognostic biomarker in both whole AML cohort and CN-AML patients.