Background

B-cell lymphomas are a diverse group of hematological neoplasms with differential etiology and clinical trajectories. Increased insights in the etiology and the discovery of prediagnostic markers have the potential to improve the clinical course of these neoplasms.

Methods

We investigated in a prospective study global gene expression in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of 263 incident B-cell lymphoma cases, diagnosed between 1 and 17 years after blood sample collection, and 439 controls, nested within two European cohorts.

Results

Our analyses identified only transcriptomic markers for specific lymphoma subtypes; few markers of multiple myeloma (N = 3), and 745 differentially expressed genes in relation to future risk of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). The strongest of these associations were consistently found in both cohorts and were related to (B-) cell signaling networks and immune system regulation pathways. CLL markers exhibited very high predictive abilities of disease onset even in cases diagnosed more than 10 years after blood collection.

Conclusions

This is the first investigation on blood cell global gene expression and future risk of B-cell lymphomas. We mainly identified genes in relation to future risk of CLL that are involved in biological pathways, which appear to be mechanistically involved in CLL pathogenesis. Many but not all of the top hits we identified have been reported previously in studies based on tumor tissues, therefore suggesting that a mixture of preclinical and early disease markers can be detected several years before CLL clinical diagnosis.

The observation of the Y (4140) structure in B± → J/ΨφK± decays produced in pp collisions at √ s = 1.96 TeV is reported with a statistical significance greater than 5 standard deviations. A fit to the J/Ψφ mass spectrum is performed assuming the presence of a Breit-Wigner resonance. The fit yields a signal of 19 ± 6 (stat) ± 3 (syst) resonance events, and resonance mass and width of 4143.4+2.9 -3.0 (stat)±0.6 (syst) MeV/c2 and 15.3+10.4 -6.1 (stat)±2.5 (syst) MeV/c2, respectively. The parameters of this resonancelike structure are consistent with values reported from an earlier CDF analysis.

We report a search for narrow resonances, produced in p p̄ collisions at √ s=1.96 TeV, that decay into muon pairs with invariant mass between 6.3 and 9.0 GeV/c 2. The data, collected with the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron collider, correspond to an integrated luminosity of 630 pb -1. We use the dimuon invariant mass distribution to set 90% upper credible limits of about 1% to the ratio of the production cross section times muonic branching fraction of possible narrow resonances to that of the Υ(1S) meson. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.