EUTOS Molecular Monitoring Objectives

Objectives of Molecular Monitoring

So far, the molecular monitoring subproject of EUTOS has successfully established a network of national and regional reference laboratories. Most of these laboratories have been assigned laboratory specific conversion factors (CFs) that enable them to convert their local results to the International Scale (IS) thus providing greater comparability between centres for key therapeutic milestones, particularly major molecular response (MMR). Work is ongoing to validate the CFs and, in addition, a laboratory performance evaluation is being undertaken to assess the ability of reference laboratories to detect resistance-associated mutations.

The main objectives of the new EUTOS programme include

• To establish definitions and laboratory processes to define complete molecular response (CMR)
• The establishment of processes to assess the molecular response of cases with rare variant BCR-ABL transcripts,
• Further performance evaluation to measure the stability of established CFs, derivation of new CFs where required and extension of the mutation control rounds.

Created by: A. Hellenbrecht , generated 2007/12/19 , last changed: 2011/05/25