Individual Response Monitoring Assay for clinical decision support of personalized ALL therapy

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients with poor response to chemotherapy have low survival chances. IRMA-4-ALL aims to overcome major limitations of gold standard minimal residual disease (MRD) quantification in ALL patients, and build an improved individual response monitoring assay (IRMA).

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients with poor response to chemotherapy have low survival chances. Therefore, they are allocated to alternative treatment as targeted immunological or pharmacological approaches, which require highly sensitive monitoring of the individual response(s) of leukemic cells. In particular, single drugs may leave behind leukemic cell populations lacking the target and requiring a different treatment. This heterogeneous nature of ALL spurs the need for an individualized response monitoring capable of recording the diverse leukemic subpopulations present in a patient.
 
IRMA-4-ALL aims to overcome major limitations of gold standard minimal residual disease (MRD) quantification in ALL patients, and build an improved individual response monitoring assay (IRMA). IRMA workflow achieves 3 technological advances, (i) automated reaction setup in the microfluidic LabDisk, (ii) increased assay specificity, sensitivity and flexibility with mediator probe (MP)-PCR and (iii) semi-automated individualized probe/primer design.