Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is most common in older adults. However, it is rarely cured by standard chemotherapy alone in older patients. According to NCI, it is critical that complete remission occurs, or there is no survival benefit. There are many clinically active therapies, including epigenetic drugs. A big translational research goal is to develop effective therapeutic strategies to demonstrate how and when oncologists should use these therapies.  A clinical combinational treatment regime could be guided in part by genome-wide methylation profiling. Genes in CpG islands and their promoters have established aberrant methylation patterns in cancers.  Perhaps also genome-wide methylation will help reveal new mechanistic details leading to new drug discoveries. Reduced representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS) was introduced by scientists … Continue reading →