Deciphering the untranslated message in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Abstract

T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) patients currently present with an overall favorable prognosis achieved through intense chemotherapy regimens. Additional challenges that are still posed today concern those patients that present with therapy resistance or relapse. In this per-spective it will be crucial to further unravel the molecular basis of T-ALL biology and identify novel targets for development of innovative therapy protocols. Technological advances in the field have opened new possibilities to dissect the T-ALL transcriptome and recent findings un-derscore the importance of noncoding RNA molecules, such as miRNAs and lncRNAs, next to protein coding genes in various cancer entities and also T-ALL. In this thesis, my aim was to landscape the expression of these noncoding RNAs in T-ALL to complement the previously published protein coding gene expression profiles. In this way, nov-el oncogenic aspects in T-ALL could be unraveled, for example when an lncRNA or miRNA is de-tected in a known T-ALL oncogenic pathway or when it could point at complete novel oncogen-ic mechanisms