Identification of Differentially Expressed Genes in AML and ALL patients by system biology approaches

Abstract

Leukemia is a hematologic malignancy caused by increasing numbers of abnormal white blood cells in the blood-forming organs. Leukemia is classified into four main types according to cell line of origin and the clinical course of the disease. AML (acute myeloid leukemia), ALL (acute lymphoblastic leukemia), CML (chronic myeloid leukemia), CLL (chronic lymphoblastic leukemia), The initial treatment of leukemia is chemotherapy but it can cause some side effects such as immune suppression, or dysfunction of the central nervous system. Therefore according to the side effects of chemotherapy and the increasing incidence of leukemia in some countries, it is urgent to discover targeted therapeutic strategies for improving leukemia patients' health. Nowadays, the microarray is one of the most efficient and accurate techniques used to determine potential biomarkers and molecular factors involved in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. In the current, we downloaded two microarray datasets from the GEO database to evaluate differentially expressed genes between AML/ALL patients using the R language package. Then functional enrichment analysis and the protein-protein interaction network analysis were performed for further investigation of screened DEGs. In this study potential target genes and molecular mechanisms were involved in AML/ALL patients were successfully identified. These findings may represent a new approach to enhance effective strategies for patients with leukemia; however, further research is required to confirm the results of our study.