Genetics of chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

Morphology and the immunophenotype of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) are quite homogenous, but CLL's clinical course is not; some patients are stable for years, others experience rapid progression and poor response to chemotherapy. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) helped determine why these differences occur. Further progress has been made using comparative genomic hybridization and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array analysis. Now the discovery of further dysregulated cellular pathways and potential new therapeutic targets is possible by genome-wide high-throughput next generation sequencing, which will likely also enter clinical diagnostics.