For many years counting cells and identifying them under the microscope has been the conventional method to determine the number of abnormal and normal cells in cancers. During the last decade, studies have shown that the detection and quantification of residual tumor cells is important in predicting the clinical outcome of several types of hematological malignancies. Detection of
minimal residual disease (MRD) is now becoming routinely implemented in treatment protocols and is increasingly used for guiding therapy and for evaluation of new treatment modalities (Raanani & Hashomer, 2004). A wide variety of techniques have been developed to detect residual malignant cells beyond the sensitivity of conventional approaches by cell morphology. One of these technology is by real time quantitative (RQ) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) using the Taqman and LightCycler systems.