Malignancy: Molecular Demonstration of BCR/ABL Fusion in a Patient with Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia with Basophilia Carrying a Variant t(16;22) (q24;q11) Philadelphia Chromosome.

We report a patient with chronic myelogenous leukemia in chronic phase and basophilia which was found to carry a simple variant t(16;22) (q24;q11) Philadelphia (Ph) chromosome in unstimulated bone marrow mononuclear cells. Molecular analysis of peripheral blood and bone marrow mononuclear cells demonstrated the presence of a bcr-abl chimeric mRNA transcript of the b(3) -a(2) type. These findings confirm that band 9q34 participates in the formation of all Ph chromosomes, either standard or variant, even when this is not detectable by conventional cytogenetics.