The Clinical Features and Prognosis of NPM1/FLT3-ITD/DNMT3A Triple-mutated Acute Myeloid Leukaemia

Abstract

Purpose: Previous studies have shown that patients with NPM1+/FLT3-ITD+ acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) have a poor prognosis, especially those with a high FLT3-ITD allelic ratio. However, no studies have confirmed a clear prognostic impact of DNMT3A on NPM1+/FLT3-ITD+ AML patients. Methods: Our study included a total of 165 patients with newly diagnosed non-acute promyelocytic leukaemia (non-APL) AML at The First Hospital of Lanzhou University between January 2018 and June 2021. Further bioinformatics analysis was performed using the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database. Results: We retrospectively studied 165 patients newly diagnosed non-APL AML and identified 11 (6.7%) patients with NPM1/FLT3-ITD/DNMT3A triple mutations. The patients with triple-mutated AML had advanced age, higher white blood cell (WBC) counts, de novo AML, normal karyotypes, and poor survival, and all were in the M4/M5 French-American-British (FAB) category. Notably, half of the patients with triple-mutated AML had mature monocyte characteristics that were difficult to distinguish from chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia (CMML). We validated the prognosis of patients with triple-mutated AML by further bioinformatics analysis and found that the GNG4 gene, one of the hub genes, was related to triple-mutated AML patients' survival. Conclusion: Our data demonstrate that DNMT3A gene mutation has adverse prognostic significance in NPM1+FLT3-ITD+comutation AML patients.