Such markers reflect cellular perturbations and can be identified in tumor tissue, lymph nodes, bone marrow, peripheral blood and other bodily fluids.
Can be expressed directly or indirectly by activation of oncogene, inactivation of tumor suppressor or DNA repair genes, activation of anti-apoptotic genes, or inactivation of pro-apoptotic genes.
Such markers are often associated with prognosis and their measurement is useful in clinical management of disease.
Markers are useful to determine a patient’s outlook.
Markers may help identify patients that will not respond to conventional therapy.
Dysregulation of genes related to reciprocal translocations between chromosomes leading to the formation of fusion genes and corresponding proteins, and genomic rearrangements juxtaposing proto-oncogenes with immunoglobulin heavy chain or T cell receptor genes, causing impaired expression of structurally normal or truncated proteins.