Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) has become a paradigm in cancer medicine for how
advances in understanding of the biology of the disease can be translated into the
development of targets for therapy and how these same targets can be used effectively as
molecular markers in the diagnosis and monitoring of the response of patients on therapy.
Traditional response criteria (based on morphologic assessment of marrow and blood
slides) and metaphase cytogenetics have proved useful in the initial prognostication of …

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a myeloproliferative neoplasm caused by the BCR-ABL1
fusion gene generation as a consequence of the t (9; 22)(q34; q11) rearrangement. The
identification of the BCR-ABL1 transcript was of critical importance for both CML diagnosis
and minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring. In this review, we report the recent
advances in the CML MRD monitoring based on RNA, DNA and protein analysis. The
detection of the BCR-ABL1 transcript by the quantitative reverse-transcriptase polymerase …