The evolving landscape of epigenetic target molecules and therapies in myeloid cancers: focus on acute myeloid leukemia and myeloproliferative neoplasms

Research on myeloid neoplasms, a field that has been driving scientific advances in cancer for over 50 years, has yielded many discoveries that have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of cancer biology. These insights, often the product of leukemia research, have been instrumental in developing more mechanism-based treatments in the early 2000s [1]. Recognizing epigenetic dysregulation as a common disease mechanism in myeloid cancers has been groundbreaking regarding recent treatment developments that exploit chromatin-based oncogenic mechanisms. In the case of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), sequencing studies aimed at assessing the complement of genetic alterations demonstrated that more than 60% of AML cases harbored disease-driving mutations in epigenetic regulators. This high prevalence underscores the importance of epigenetic dysregulation in AML pathogenesis [2, 3]. Chromatin regulators commonly control disease-specific transcriptional programs, making them attractive therapeutic targets to manipulate neoplastic gene expression programs, particularly in myeloid neoplasms. Several drugs targeting epigenetic mechanisms and exploiting myeloid disease-specific dependencies have recently been approved for treating myeloid neoplasms. Many additional drugs are currently being investigated in clinical trials, and numerous new compound developments are being studied in preclinical studies. This manuscript will review (1) chromatin-based disease mechanisms, such as DNA methylation, chromatin regulatory complexes, and histone modifications, currently investigated for therapeutic exploitation in myeloid malignancies, and (2) therapeutic developments already approved or investigated for treating these diseases.

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