We investigated the biological features of FL and their relationship to patients’ outcome. Gene expression analysis was carried out on diagnosis biopsies from 148 follicular lymphoma patients enrolled in the PRIMA clinical trial. We developed a gene expression-based predictor of progression-free survival (PFS) in high-tumour burden FL patients and we analysed gene-expression signatures reflecting different aspects of tumour biology for their association with outcome. proposition SH: We investigated the biological features of FL and their relationship to patients’ outcome. Gene expression analysis was carried out on diagnosis biopsies from 148 follicular lymphoma patients enrolled in the PRIMA clinical trial. We developed a gene expression-based predictor of progression-free survival (PFS) in high-tumour burden FL patients and we analysed gene-expression signatures reflecting different aspects of tumour biology for their association with outcome.
Overall design
Fresh-frozen tissue tumour biopsies were prospectively obtained from untreated FL patients participating in the international phase 3 PRIMA trial that evaluated rituximab maintenance after chemotherapy and rituximab induction (NCT00140582). Gene-expression profiling was performed using Affymetrix U133 Plus 2.0 micro-array. These data were used to identify a gene expression signature predicting early relapse in a supervised analysis. An unsupervised analysis was performed to identify the main components of transcriptional heterogeneity among follicular lymphoma tumours.