Benchmarking standard-of-care and emerging genomic approaches to enhance diagnosis in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Abstract

Background: The molecular characterisation of pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (pALL) is essential for accurate diagnosis and risk stratification. However, standard-of-care (SoC) methods have limited sensitivity and resolution.

Methods: This study evaluates the clinical utility of emerging genomic technologies-including optical genome mapping (OGM), digital multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (dMLPA), RNA sequencing (RNA-seq), and targeted next-generation sequencing (t-NGS)-in the largest cohort of pALL patients analysed to date, with 60 cases using OGM.

Results: Considering clinically relevant alterations identified with at least two different methods, OGM as a standalone test demonstrated superior resolution, detecting chromosomal gains and losses (51.7% vs. 35%, p = 0.0973) and gene fusions (56.7% vs. 30%, p = 0.0057), while resolving 15% of non-informative cases. Combining dMLPA and RNA-seq was the most effective approach, achieving precise classification of complex subtypes and uniquely identifying IGH rearrangements undetected by other techniques. OGM identified clinically relevant alterations in 90% of cases, and the dMLPA-RNAseq combination reached 95%, compared to 46.7% with SoC techniques.

Conclusions: Integrating these technologies into diagnostic workflows overcomes SoC limitations. OGM and the dMLPA-RNAseq combination emerge as front-line strategies, addressing pALL heterogeneity, streamlining molecular testing, and informing treatment decisions to improve outcomes.