The Janus family of tyrosine kinases (JAK) plays an essential role in
development and in coupling cytokine receptors to downstream intracell
ular signaling events. A t(9;12)(p24;p13) chromosomal translocation in
a T cell childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia patient was character
ized and shown to fuse the 3' portion of JAK2 to the 5' region of TEL,
a gene encoding a member of the ETS transcription factor family, The
TEL-JAK2 fusion protein includes the catalytic domain of JAK2 and the
TEL-specific oligomerization domain, TEL-induced oligomerization of TE
L-JAK2 resulted in the constitutive activation of its tyrosine kinase
activity and conferred cytokine-independent proliferation to the inter
leukin-3-dependent Ba/F3 hematopoietic cell line.