Marija A Zarocsinceva, Moosa Qureshi, Nicola K Wilson, George Giotopoulos, Blaise Musabe, Katherine H M Sturgess, M S Vijayabaskar, Sarah J Kinston, Ryan Asby, David J Adams, Brian J P Huntly, Fernando J Calero-Nieto, Berthold Göttgens
Leukaemia arises through the stepwise transformation of healthy haematopoietic cells, yet the asymptomatic premalignant phase and its progression to overt disease remain poorly understood. To model this process, we engineered a patient-derived CEBPA mutation into Hoxb8-FL multipotent murine progenitors and transplanted them into syngeneic mice, capturing a clinically silent premalignant stage. All recipients developed overt disease after ~12 months with 100% penetrance and all acquired secondary RTK-RAS mutations, often with identical amino acid changes to those in patients. Single-cell transcriptomics and phenotypic profiling showed that premalignant mutant cells adopt a plasmacytoid dendritic progenitor-like state in vitro which generates both myeloid and B-lymphoid lineages during premalignancy in vivo, with individual tumours restricted to one lineage. The specificity for RTK-RAS mutations coupled with ongoing differentiation, reflects clinically relevant biological contexts thus providing a tractable model of myeloid neoplasm for mechanistic studies and drug discovery.