Mutation Testing

[Guest guest]

Hi all. Hope this finds everyone doing well.

I just wanted to update everyone on mutation testing I had done at

Dr. Sawyer's lab at UCLA in February for 2004. When the initial

results came in last year, Dr. Shah - of Dr. Sawyer's lab indicated

that there might be some type of Gleevec resistance that I had but he

wanted to rerun the test due to potential contamination from the lab

(He said there were alot of mutations in the lab that could

potentially contaminate the test so they always run it twice). Of

course when I heard there was a potential mutation I about flipped

out. Dr. Shah told me to be patient and wait it out as they reran

the test. To make a long story short, I got cold-feet and never

followed up with him . . . having realized that I potentially opened

up 'Pandora's Box' and at that point wasn't even sure if I wanted to

know what mutations I might have . . . I know that sounds a bit naive

but I didn't know if I wanted to know at that point - given that I

was still responding to IM.

I got up the nerve today to correspond to Dr. Shah again to see if he

could give me my results. I gingerly hit the send key on the

computer - still not sure I wanted to know. But, that info could

potentially be very important should I need to switch to the AMN or

BMS trial and should IM ever stop working.

Dr. Shah's response was a breath of fresh air . . .

====================

Hello,

I apologize. We did not find any evidence of kinase domain mutation

in your sample.

Glad to hear you are continuing to do well.

Kind regards,

Neil Shah

=======================

As you can imagine I am very much relieved. Anyway - I wanted to

share the latest and greatest with you. BTW, my latest pcr was done

at OHSU. Typically they run the ultra quant test but they seemed to

have problems with it so they ran a nested. I showed up " weakly

positive " for the the BCR abl so I am still positive but at low

levels of the disease. I'll take that news for sure.

Thanks all. Just a reminder to keep Dane and Gregg - and all our

other transplant family members - in your daily prayers.

Sending hugs

Love,

Barb