ARTN and CCL23 predicted chemosensitivity in acute myeloid leukemia: an Olink proteomics approach.

Background: The standard "7 + 3" induction results in 30% of de novo acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients not achieving complete remission (CR). We aimed to utilize the Olink platform to compare the bone marrow plasma proteomic profiles of newly diagnosed de novo AML patients who did and did not achieve CR following "7 + 3" induction treatment.

Methods: This prospective study included 43 untreated AML patients, stratified into CR (n = 29) and non-CR (n = 14) groups based on their response to "7 + 3" induction therapy. We employed the Olink Explore-384 Inflammation platform for proteomic analysis to investigate differences in bone marrow plasma protein levels between the CR and non-CR groups.

Results: Proteomic analysis demonstrated that the CR group exhibited significantly higher bone marrow plasma levels of ARTN and CCL23 than did the non-CR group. Immunohistochemical staining confirmed a higher proportion of tissue samples with intense staining for ARTN (25.40% vs. 7.05%, p = 0.013) and CCL23 (24.14% vs. 14.29%, p = 0.039) in the CR group. These findings were corroborated by bulk-RNA-seq, which indicated significantly elevated mRNA expression levels of ARTN (1.93 vs. -0.09; p = 0.003) and CCL23 (1.50 vs. 0.12; p = 0.021) in the CR group. The Human Protein Atlas provided external support for our findings.

Conclusions: The results suggest that ARTN and CCL23 may serve as biomarkers for predicting responsiveness to the "7 + 3" induction in untreated AML. Using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay to identify the roles of ARTN and CCL23 in predicting AML chemosensitivity may enhance clinical applicability in the future.