Dr. Wang Hui
Ludaopei Medical (Hebei Yanda Ludaopei Hospital, Beijing Ludaopei Hospital)
The 49th European Bone Marrow Transplantation Annual Meeting (EBMT 2023) took place in Paris, France, from April 23 to 26, 2023. Experts and scholars from various countries gathered to present exciting advancements in research. In the field of blood tests, the fifty-year anniversary of flow cytometry coincided with this year’s conference. Over the past half-century, this technology has become an indispensable tool in the diagnosis and follow-up of hematological malignancies. Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) is the most common acute leukemia in adults, and the detection of Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) plays a crucial role in clinical treatment and prognosis assessment, despite encountering various technical challenges. With the release of two significant expert consensus statements by the European Leukemia Network (ELN) in 2018 and 2021, technical issues related to AML MRD detection by Multiparameter Flow Cytometry (MFC) were discussed, making this research once again the focus of the hematology field.
At the EBMT 2023 conference, a real-world study conducted by Professor Hui Wang’s team at Hebei Yanda Ludaopei Hospital and Beijing Ludaopei Hospital was selected for poster presentation (Abstract Number: P765). The research introduced a highly efficient and practical MFC-based approach for AML MRD detection at Ludaopei Hospital. Oncology Frontier is honored to invite Professor Wang Hui to provide an in-depth interpretation and analysis of this study, as outlined below.
Dr. Hui Wang told us:
The greatest advantage of MFC-based MRD detection is its speed, practicality, cost-effectiveness, and wide coverage. It holds strong prognostic value for both chemotherapy and allogeneic transplantation. Currently, commonly used 3-laser, 8- to 10-color models can achieve sensitivities of 10-3 to 10-4 or even 10-5 with a coverage of 90%. However, there are certain bottlenecks, such as susceptibility to factors like sample quality, differences in immunophenotypes between tumor cells and normal myeloid progenitor cells, changes in antigen expression during treatment, clonal hematopoiesis, drug treatment, infections, bone marrow regeneration, and operator experience, especially evident in AML testing. Therefore, designing an efficient and
practical protocol, expanding the analysis dimensions, potentially developing artificial intelligence, and integrating with tumor stem cells and the immune microenvironment for comprehensive assessment could be the future direction of MFC-based AML MRD detection.
Our research provides a clinically practical and efficient detection protocol, along with corresponding software analysis methods, aimed at assisting colleagues in their diagnostic work.
