Cancer malignancies are caused by the acquisition of somatic
mutations that act with hereditary genetic variations initiating
the development of malignant tumors by disrupting the cell’s
normal machinery. They are caused by mainly three genetic
events: copy number alteration,
mutations, and translocations. In general, leukemia is considered the most
prevalent malignancy affecting children and accounts for one-third of all pediatric
malignant tumors. Moreover, three-quarters of the diagnosed childhood leukemia
are of ALL type, which is the proliferation of malignant lymphatic cells whose
differentiation was stopped at an early stage. The aim of this project was to test for
the presence of two translocations t(12;21) and t(1;19), yielding the two fusion
genes ETV6-RUNX1 and TCF3-PBX1 respectively, in 27 samples of newly diagnosed
B-ALL patients in Children Cancer Hospital (57357), for the subsequent risk
stratification of these patients. This was done by using the molecular technique RTPCR,
by first extracting the RNA from the samples then converting it into cDNA,
then amplifying the housekeeping gene ABL to determine the quality of the
processed samples, and finally amplifying the two translocations using the
conventional PCR methods. The results have shown that 2 patients harbored the
translocation t(12;21) and 3 other patients carried the translocation t(1;19),
expressing a frequency rate that contradicts the normally reported ones