Acute myeloid leukemia is a disease with a grim prognosis – only a quarter of patients over the age of 20 survive to five years after diagnosis. But people with a particular genetic mutation respond to treatment much better than others, dramatically improving their clinical outcome.
A team led by University of Illinois Cancer Center member Andrei Gartel, PhD, part of the Cancer Center’s Cancer Biology research program and associate professor of molecular genetics at the University of Illinois Chicago, used that genetic clue to identify a novel compound that could help others with acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, enjoy the same therapeutic advantages.
The research, published in Blood Cancer Journal, examined the links between a mutation in the NPM1 gene and its regulation of FOXM1, a transcription factor implicated in many different cancers.