Next-Generation Sequencing-Based Clonality Assessment of Ig Gene Rearrangements: A Multicenter Validation Study by EuroClonality-NGS.

Ig gene (IG) clonality analysis has an important role in the distinction of benign and malignant B-cell lymphoid proliferations and is mostly performed with the conventional EuroClonality/BIOMED-2 multiplex PCR protocol and GeneScan fragment size analysis. Recently, the EuroClonality-NGS Working Group developed a method for next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based IG clonality analysis. Herein, we report the results of an international multicenter biological validation of this novel method compared with the gold standard EuroClonality/BIOMED-2 protocol, based on 209 specimens of reactive and neoplastic lymphoproliferations. NGS-based IG clonality analysis showed a high interlaboratory concordance (99%) and high concordance with conventional clonality analysis (98%) for the molecular conclusion. Detailed analysis of the individual IG heavy chain and kappa light chain targets showed that NGS-based clonality analysis was more often able to detect a clonal rearrangement or yield an interpretable result. NGS-based and conventional clonality analysis detected a clone in 96% and 95% of B-cell neoplasms, respectively, and all but one of the reactive cases were scored polyclonal. We conclude that NGS-based IG clonality analysis performs comparable to conventional clonality analysis. We provide critical parameters for interpretation and discuss a first step toward a quantitative scoring approach for NGS clonality results. Considering the advantages of NGS-based clonality analysis, including its high sensitivity and possibilities for accurate clonal comparison, this supports implementation in diagnostic practice. Copyright © 2021 Association for Molecular Pathology and American Society for Investigative Pathology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Citation

Michiel van den Brand, Jos Rijntjes, Markus Möbs, Julia Steinhilber, Michèle Y van der Klift, Kim C Heezen, Leonie I Kroeze, Tomas Reigl, Jakub Porc, Nikos Darzentas, Jeroen A C W Luijks, Blanca Scheijen, Frédéric Davi, Hesham ElDaly, Hongxiang Liu, Ioannis Anagnostopoulos, Michael Hummel, Falko Fend, Anton W Langerak, Patricia J T A Groenen, EuroClonality-NGS Working Group. Next-Generation Sequencing-Based Clonality Assessment of Ig Gene Rearrangements: A Multicenter Validation Study by EuroClonality-NGS. The Journal of molecular diagnostics : JMD. 2021 Sep;23(9):1105-1115

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PMID: 34186174

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