Predicting time to relapse in acute myeloid leukemia through stochastic modeling of minimal residual disease based on clonality data

Event‐free and overall survival remain poor for patients with acute myeloid leukemia. Chemoresistant clones contributing to relapse arise from minimal residual disease (MRD) or newly acquired mutations. However, the dynamics of clones comprising MRD is poorly understood. We developed a predictive stochastic model, based on a multitype age‐dependent Markov branching process, to describe how random events in MRD contribute to the heterogeneity in treatment response. We employed training and validation sets of patients who underwent whole‐genome sequencing and for whom mutant clone frequencies at diagnosis and relapse were available. The disease evolution and treatment outcome are subject to stochastic fluctuations. Estimates of malignant clone growth rates, obtained by model fitting, are consistent with published data. Using the estimates from the training set, we developed a function linking MRD and time of relapse with MRD inferred from the model fits to clone frequencies and other data. An independent validation set confirmed our model. In a third dataset, we fitted the model to data at diagnosis and remission and predicted the time to relapse. As a conclusion, given bone marrow genome at diagnosis and MRD at or past remission, the model can predict time to relapse and help guide treatment decisions to mitigate relapse.