Published online 1 October 2009
Haematologica, Vol 94, Issue 12, 1676-1681 doi:10.3324/haematol.2009.011205
Copyright © 2009 by Ferrata Storti Foundation
Myelodysplastic/Myeloproliferative Neoplasms |
TET2 gene mutation is a frequent and adverse event in chronic myelomonocytic leukemia
Olivier Kosmider1,2,3,4,
Véronique Gelsi-Boyer5,
Marion Ciudad6,7,
Cindy Racoeur6,7,8,
Valérie Jooste6,7,
Norbert Vey5,
Bruno Quesnel9,
Pierre Fenaux10,11,
Jean-Noël Bastie6,7,8,
Odile Beyne-Rauzy12,
Aspasia Stamatoulas13,
François Dreyfus1,2,3,4,
Norbert Ifrah14,
Stéphane de Botton15,
William Vainchenker15,
Oliver A. Bernard16,
Daniel Birnbaum5,
Michaëla Fontenay1,2,3,4,
Eric Solary6,7,8,15 on behalf of the Groupe Francophone des Myélodysplasies
1 Hematology Department, Hôpital Cochin (APHP), Paris
2 Inserm U567, Paris
3 CNRS UMR 8104, Paris
4 University Paris 5, Faculty of Medicine René Descartes, UM 3, Paris
5 Hematology Department, Institut Paoli-Calmettes, Marseille
6 Inserm UMR866, 7 Boulevard Jeanne dArc, Dijon
7 University of Burgundy, Faculty of Medicine, 7 Boulevard Jeanne dArc, Dijon
8 CHU Le Bocage, Dijon
9 CHU Lille, Lille
10 Hôpital Avicenne (APHP)/ University Paris 13, Bobigny
11 Inserm U848, Institut Gustave Roussy/University Paris 11, Villejuif
12 CHU Purpan, Toulouse
13 CHU Rouen, Rouen
14 CHU Angers, Angers
15 Inserm U790, Institut Gustave Roussy/University Paris 11, Villejuif
16 Inserm E010, Hôpital Necker/University Paris 5, Paris, France
Correspondence: Eric Solary, Inserm UMR866, Faculty of Medicine, 7 boulevard Jeanne dArc, 21000 Dijon, France. E-mail: esolary{at}u-bourgogne.fr

ABSTRACT
Background: Acquired somatic deletions and loss-of-function mutations in
one or several codons of the
TET2 (
Ten-Eleven Translocation-2)
gene were recently identified in hematopoietic cells from patients
with myeloid malignancies, including myeloproliferative disorders
and myelodys-plastic syndromes. The present study was designed
to determine the prevalence of
TET2 gene alterations in chronic
myelomonocytic leukemias.
Design and Methods: Blood and bone marrow cells were collected from 88 patients with chronic phase chronic myelomonocytic leukemia and from 14 with acute transformation of a previously identified disease. Polymerase chain reaction analysis and direct sequencing were used to sequence exons 3 to 11 of the TET2 gene. Annotated single nucleotide polymorphisms were excluded. Survival curves were constructed by the Kaplan-Meier method.
Results: We detected TET2 mutations in 44 of 88 (50%) patients with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia, which suggests that TET2 gene mutations are especially frequent in this myeloid disease. A TET2 gene alteration was identified in 18 of the 43 patients studied at diagnosis and was associated with a trend to a lower overall survival rate; confining the analysis to the 29 patients with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia-1, according to the WHO classification, the difference in overall survival between patients with or without TET2 gene mutations became statistically significant.
Conclusions: TET2 gene alterations are more frequent in chronic myelomonocytic leukemia than in other subgroups of hematopoietic diseases studied so far and could negatively affect the patients outcome. The striking association between TET2 gene alterations and monocytosis, already observed in patients with systemic mastocytosis, could indicate a negative role of TET2 in the control of monocytic lineage determination.
Key words: TET2 gene, mutation, chronic myelomonocytic leukemia.

Introduction
Chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMML) is a clonal myelodysplastic/myeloproliferative
disorder observed in the elderly.
1 The most frequent genetic
abnormalities identified in this disease include mutations in
RUNX12,3 and in the polycomb-associated gene
ASXL1.
4 A copy-neutral
uniparental disomy is also frequent and can be associated with
mutations of the
CBL gene.
5,6 RAS gene mutations are observed
in one third of CMML,
7 while other acquired genetic abnormalities
are limited to small subgroups.
8 It remains difficult to distinguish
among these somatic events those that drive the disease pathogenesis
from those that are acquired as a consequence of disease progression.
Using various genetic approaches, acquired somatic mutations
(deletions, insertions, nonsense and missense point mutations)
in the coding sequence of
TET2 (
Ten-Eleven Translocation-2)
gene were recently identified in hematopoietic cells from patients
with myeloid malignancies, including myeloproliferative disorders
and myelodysplastic syndromes.
9–17 Colony studies in informative
cases of myeloproliferative disorders suggested that
TET2 mutations
could precede the
JAKV617F mutation and may endow cells with
an increased ability to repopulate the bone marrow of NOD/SCID
mice, with respect to
TET2 wild-type hematopoietic stem cells.
14 The incidence of
TET2 gene alterations in various myeloid
diseases has been suggested to range between 10 and 25%.
9–17 In patients with systemic mastocytosis, a significantly higher
incidence of
TET2 mutations was associated with monocytosis.
10 The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence and
prognostic impact of
TET2 gene mutations in CMML.

Design and methods
Samples
Peripheral blood and/or bone marrow cells were collected between
February 2005 and October 2008 in Dijon (Inserm UMR866) and
Marseille (IPC) from 88 patients with CMML1 (n=70) or CMML2
(n=18) according to the World Health Organization (WHO) criteria
1 and from 14 patients with acute blastic transformation of
a previously identified CMML. Patients signed informed consent
to participation in the study in accordance with current ethical
regulations. Six of the nine CMML patients included in a previous
study
14 are part of the present series (the other three were
excluded because of lack of sufficient clinical or biological
information). We also included 46 patients in whom the
ALXL1 sequence had been previously examined.
4 None of the other cases
has ever been reported. Samples were collected from consecutive
patients seen in the different centers, pending the collection
of sufficient biological material and annotations. Patients
with CMML in chronic phase were either newly diagnosed (n=43)
or known to have this hematopoietic disease and were being followed
up every 3 months in the absence of active therapy, while receiving
supportive care or during cytotoxic treatment (n=45), in most
cases with hydroxyurea. Acute transformation was considered
to have occurred when the blastic phase was identified. The
main characteristics of the patients studied are summarized
in
Table 1.
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Table 1. Characteristics of the studied patients according to the pressence or absence of TET2 mutations. The only significant difference (higher count of peripheral blood monocytes in the TET2 mutated group) was not confirmed when analysis was limited to patients at diagnosis.
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Nucleic acid methods
Blood and bone marrow samples were collected on EDTA and mononuclear
cells were selected by Ficoll Hypaque. DNA was extracted using
commercial kits (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany). Polymerase chain
reaction (PCR) analysis and direct sequencing were performed
using standard conditions with gene-specific primers designed
to amplify coding sequences spanning from exon 3 to exon 11
of the
TET2 gene, as described elsewhere.
14,17 For each PCR
reaction, 20 ng of genomic DNA were used for the PCR amplification
followed by magnetic bead purification and bidirectional sequencing
using ABI 3300 capillary sequencers (Agencourt Bioscience, Beverly,
MA, USA). Mutation Surveyor (Softgenetics, Inc., Stat College,
PA, USA) was used to detect nonsense and missense mutations
located in conserved regions spanning from 1134–1444 and
1842–1921 and sequences were reviewed manually to detect
frameshift mutations.
TET2 abnormalities were numbered according
to the FM 992369 EMBL nucleotide sequence database. Previously
annotated single nucleotide polymorphisms (
http//www.hapmap.org)
were not considered pathogenic. The
ASXL1 sequence was determined
in 49 samples, as described previously.
4
Comparative genomic hybridization arrays
Comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) was performed using 244K CGH Microarrays (Hu-244A, Agilent Technologies, Massy, France) with a resolution up to 6 Kb. Scanning was done with an Agilent Autofocus Dynamic Scanner (G2565BA, Agilent Technologies).2,4 Copy number changes in the 4q24 region between 104,680 and 106,960 according to http//www.genome.ucsc.edu were characterized.
Statistical analysis
Statistical analyses were performed using Stata 10TM. All p values were two-tailed and the threshold of statistical significance was p less than 0.05. Clinical and biological parameters were recorded at the time of diagnosis or referral to the medical center. Categorical variables are reported as counts and relative frequencies (%) and compared between groups by
2 or exact Fishers statistics. Continuous variables are indicated as medians and ranges. We used the Mann-Whitney U test to compare continuous variables. Survival curves were constructed by the Kaplan-Meier method using the interval from the date of diagnosis to the date of last contact or death and compared using the log-rank test. A multivariable Cox model was fitted in order to take age at diagnosis into account.

Results
The nature and frequency of somatic mutations affecting the
TET2 coding sequences were studied in bone marrow or peripheral
blood collected from 88 patients with chronic phase CMML according
to the WHO criteria. A mutation of the
TET2 gene was detected
in 44 out of these 88 (50%) patients. The
TET2 gene was mutated
in 18 (42%) of the 43 patients studied at diagnosis, and in
26 of the 45 patients (58%) studied during the course of their
disease. These results suggest that the prevalence of
TET2 mutations
is higher in CMML than in any other myeloid disease studied.
9–17 The broad range of myeloid disorders in which mutations
in the
TET2 gene have been identified suggests that the gene
has a pleiotropic role in these diseases. It remains to be established
what role the mutation plays in the phenotype of the disorders.
The striking association between the presence of a
TET2 mutation
and monocytosis in patients with systemic mastocytosis
10 and
the very high incidence of
TET2 mutations in CMML1 found in
this and other studies
1–14 lends support to a phenotypic
association.
Among an additional series of 14 CMML patients who had 20% or more blast cells in the bone marrow, indicating blastic transformation, a TET2 mutation was identified in two patients (14%) (Table 2). It was shown recently that the JAK2V617F mutation is frequently absent in leukemic blast cells from patients with transformed JAK2V617F-positive myeloproliferative disorders. In these patients, leukemic transformation could arise from a JAK2V617F-negative ancestor cell.18 Larger series and follow-up of individual cases will be needed to determine whether the TET2 mutation, when present at diagnosis, can be lost upon leukemic transformation.
Two distinct mutations in the sequence of the
TET2 gene were
identified in 23 out of the 44 (52%)
TET2-mutated patients with
chronic phase CMML, including 6 out of the 18 (33%) patients
whose mutations were identified at diagnosis, and 16 out of
the 26 (61%) patients whose mutations were identified during
the course of their disease. Two distinct mutations were also
identified in one of the patients in blastic transformation
of CMML. Altogether, 68 mutations were identified, including
29 frameshift mutations, 20 nonsense mutations, 16 missense
mutations and 3 mutations targeting a splice site. The mutations
most frequently involved exon 3 (22 events), exon 10 (9 events)
and exon 11 (13 events). Missense mutations were considered
if located in conserved domains, most of them leading to modifications
in potentially important amino-acids in the protein
19 (
Table 2,
Figure 1).
Conventional cytogenetic analysis of bone marrow was performed
in 72 of the 88 patients with chronic phase CMML and detected
abnormalities in 17 cases but never identified any deletion
of the 4q24 band, in either the mutated or the non-mutated group
of patients. Genome-wide high-density arrays (CGH) compared
the leukemic cell profile to normal DNA in 28 of the 88 cases
and detected a
TET2 deletion (according to the
http://genome.uscs.edu)
in one of the ten studied patients with a mutated
TET2 copy.
Thus, copy number alterations and deletion of the wild-type
TET2 copy in
TET2-mutant CMML cases appears to be uncommon,
although this remains to be proven in larger series.
20 It is
too early to determine whether the numbers and types of mutation
(point mutation or frameshift) and the gene dosage (loss of
one or two copies) differ among the various myeloid disorders
and contribute to the disease phenotype. When the
ASXL1 gene
sequence could be analyzed simultaneously (n=49), a mutation
was found in patients with wild-type as well as mutated
TET2 (7 of 14 samples and 14 of 35 respectively;
p=ns).
The clinical and biological features of the 88 patients with chronic phase CMML are presented in Table 1. The presence of a TET2 mutation was associated with a trend towards higher monocyte and lower platelet counts. Analysis of overall survival was performed in the 43 patients whose TET2 status was determined at diagnosis and indicated a lower 1-year overall survival rate in the 18 patients of this cohort with a TET2 mutation, but the difference was not statistically significant (Figure 2A). When the overall survival analysis was limited to the 29 patients with CMML1, according to the WHO classification, and a follow-up of at least 2 months, the difference between those with and without TET2 mutations became significant (p<0.01 Figure 2B). The survival of CMML1 and CMML2 patients was not significantly different at 12 months but all patients with CMML2 died within 28 months of diagnosis whereas half of the CMML1 patients were still alive (data not shown). The survival of patients with secondary acute myeloid leukemia was significantly shorter than that of those with CMML1 or CMML2 (p<0.04, data not shown). None of the other tested parameters, including age, sex and FAB classification, affected survival. Given the low number of patients in each group, only age was introduced in the Cox model and did not affect the trend for a negative effect of TET2 mutation on survival (p=0.08).

Discussion
The present study indicates that, in addition to
RUNX1,
2,3 ASXL1,
4 and
RAS genes,
6 TET2 is a commonly mutated gene in patients
with CMML. Half of the patients with mutated
TET2 had two distinct
gene alterations, suggesting that the two gene copies were affected.
In four cases, sequencing results showed a 100% mutant sequence,
which could indicate a combination of
TET2 mutation and either
uniparental disomy or 4q24 deletion or a homozygous mutation.
We did not collect enough biological material to perform CGH,
which would have been able to identify 4q24 deletions involving
TET2, and single nucleotide polymorphism analysis, which would
have been able to detect segmental acquired uniparental disomy
resulting in loss of heterozygosity.
5 Based on the series published
to date, the frequency of
TET2 mutations in chronic phase CMML
ranges between 35 and 42%.
11–13 TET2 gene mutations were
associated with increased monocytosis, as observed in mastocytosis.
10 We also noted a higher number of immature dysplastic granulocytes
in the peripheral blood of CMLL patients with mutated
TET2 gene
(
data not shown). Identification of other surrogate markers
of the
TET2 mutation may be useful as the mutations in this
gene as well as in other genes recently identified to be mutated
in CMML, such as
ASXL1,
4 are spread over the full length of
the genes.
The TET family includes three genes (TET1, TET2 and TET3) with highly conserved regions.13 TET1, standing for ten-eleven translocation 1, is also known as CXX6 or LCX and was identified as a fusion partner of the MLL gene in the acute myeloid leukemia-associated translocation t(10;11)(q22;q23).21,22 The MLL-TET1 fusion gene was also detected in two adults with CD10-negative B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia23 and a single nucleotide polymorphism in the TET1 gene coding region has been associated with late-onset Alzheimer's disease.24 Recent evidence indicates that TET1, and possibly other proteins of the family, encodes an enzyme responsible for the conversion of 5-methylcytosine to 5-hydroxymethylcytosine,19 thus having potential roles in CpG methylation pattern and epigenetic regulation. TET2 was suggested to have tumor suppressor function14 but the physiological functions of the TET2 protein in hematopoiesis are yet to be identified, for example, to determine whether TET2 could negatively regulate monocyte lineage determination, and to analyze how the loss of TET2 protein through a variety of genetic mechanisms leads to myeloid cell proliferation and dysplasia.
The negative prognostic impact of TET2 mutations in chronic phase CMML needs to be corroborated in a prospective study determining the combined clinical impact of recently identified frequent mutations in TET2, ASXL1, RUNX1 and RAS genes.2–6 Such a prospective study has been initiated by the Groupe Francophone des Myelodysplasies in the context of an ongoing phase II trial testing decitabine in CMML patients.

Footnotes
OK and VG-B contributed equally to the work.
Funding: this work was supported by grants from the Programme Hospitalier de Recherche Clinique (PHRC national MAD06 to MF and ES), the Ligue Nationale Contre le Cancer (équipes labellisées, ES, OB, VW), the association «cent-poursanglavie», the Association Nationale de la Recherche (ES), the National Institute of Cancer (INCa – ES, MF, OB, WV), the Canceropole Ile-de-France (AAP INCA 2008) (MF), and the Fondation de France, Fondation contre la leucémie (OB, DB).
Authorship and Disclosures
OK and VGB performed genetic analyses, MC and CR received the samples and sorted the cells, VJ performed statistical analyses, NV, BQ, PF, NJB; OBR, AS, FD, NI, and SdB provided samples, WV and OAB discovered TET2 mutations, DB, MF and ES designed the study, ES wrote the paper.
The authors reported no potential conflicts of interest.
Received for publication May 12, 2009.
Revision received July 1, 2009.
Accepted for publication July 1, 2009.

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