Description
In order to identify relevant, molecularly defined subgroups in Multiple Myeloma (MM), gene expression profiling (GEP) was performed on purified CD138+ plasma cells of 320 newly diagnosed myeloma patients included in the Dutch-Belgian/German HOVON-65/ GMMG-HD4 trial using Affymetrix GeneChip U133 plus 2.0 arrays. Hierarchical clustering identified 10 distinct subgroups. Using this dataset as training data, a prognostic signature was built. The dataset consists of 282 CEL files previously used in the hierarchical clustering study of Broyl et al (Blood, 116(14):2543-53, 2010) outlined above. To this set 8 CEL-files/gene expression profiles were added. Using this set of 290 CEL-files, a prognostic signature of 92 genes (EMC-92-genesignature) was generated by supervised principal components analysis combined with simulated annealing (Kuiper et al.).