EHA 2026 | Age and cytogenetics influence prognostic value of copy number profiles in B-cell ALL
Anthony Moorman, PhD, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK, discusses findings from a large HARMONY Alliance analysis exploring how age and cytogenetic risk influence the prognostic value of copy number alteration profiles in B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Prof. Moorman highlights how biomarkers derived from pediatric ALL are often less predictive in adult disease, underscoring the need for age-specific risk models and more comprehensive approaches to risk stratification beyond single biomarkers. This interview took place at the 31st Congress of the European Hematology Association (EHA) in Stockholm, Sweden.
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Transcript
One of the things that I’ve tried to do throughout my entire career is look at risk factors in ALL at all ages. Many study groups and many researchers focus on pediatric or they focus on adult ALL but I’ve tried to make it my point to span the entire spectrum and what the Harmony Alliance Foundation did is collected data on all hematological malignancies actually at all ages but within the scope of ALL what we did is we collected a huge amount of data from both clinical trials and real-world data from several centers across Europe and we built up a cohort of well over 10,000 patients...
One of the things that I’ve tried to do throughout my entire career is look at risk factors in ALL at all ages. Many study groups and many researchers focus on pediatric or they focus on adult ALL but I’ve tried to make it my point to span the entire spectrum and what the Harmony Alliance Foundation did is collected data on all hematological malignancies actually at all ages but within the scope of ALL what we did is we collected a huge amount of data from both clinical trials and real-world data from several centers across Europe and we built up a cohort of well over 10,000 patients. And we’ve been able to mine that data specifically to look at the prognostic effect of copy number alteration profiles in that cohort by age. And what we found is that most of the profiles that we kind of know about have actually come from childhood ALL research and are not as predictive in adult ALL as they are in pediatric ALL. And there seems to be a kind of gradual decrease in their effectiveness. So they’re very prognostic in children, a little bit less so in adolescents, less so in young adults. And by the time you get to the older adults, less so again. So what you really need to do is take into account both age and the copy number alteration profile, and ideally what we probably need to do is build up our adult ALL cohorts and look at them separately to develop adult ALL specific copy number profiles in order to take that forward into the clinic.
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