JAK2V617F allele burden in patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms

Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) are clonal malignant diseases that represent a group of conditions including polycythemia vera (PV), essential thrombocythemia (ET), and myelofibrosis (MF). The JAK2-V617F mutation is prevalent in almost all patients with MPNs and has become a valuable biomarker for diagnosis of MPNs. A different allele burden in these entities has long been noticed. The aim of our study was to assess the JAK2 allele burden in our JAK2V617F positive cases and its association with phenotype if any and to select a simple, sensitive assay for use in our clinical molecular diagnostic laboratory. Methodologies reported in this literature include amplification refractory mutation system–polymerase chain reaction (ARMS-PCR) and real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RQ-PCR). We analyzed 174 cases by RQ-PCR for the quantification of JAK2V617F were initially screened by ARMS-PCR. We found that V617F allele burden in the entire population of patients was 73 % ranging from 0.97 to 95 %. The median V617F allele burden in PV patients was 40 %, MF was 95 %, and ET was 25 %. ARMS-PCR and RQ-PCR were proven to be sensitive since ARMS-PCR is a qualitative method; it can be used to screen JAK2V617F mutation and RQ-PCR was used to quantify the V617F cells. Our study suggests that JAK2V617F positivity is associated with MPNs, and its allele burden is an excellent diagnostic marker for disease subtypes, prognosis, disease phenotype and complication, and evolution. The data indicates that ARMS-PCR is simple and can be easily performed for the primary screening of JAK2V617F mutation, and RQ-PCR is sensitive enough to detect low mutant allele levels (>10 %), specific enough not to produce false positive results, and can be performed for the JAK2V617F allele burden quantification.