(Pamplona, Spain, August 20, 2020) — A joint research by groups of the EDITOR Accelerator Award have discovered a molecular trait that is shared by myeloma patients.
Multiple myeloma is a greatly heterogeneous disease, both from biological and clinical perspectives. In spite of this heterogeneity, several groups of the EDITOR accelerator award have discovered a molecular trait that is shared by myeloma patients. The study has been led by the groups of Xabier Agirre and Felipe Prosper from the CIMA of Pamplona and Iñaki Martin-Subero from the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, also with the participation of Jesus San Miguel, coordinator of the EDITOR project. The article, recently published in Genome Research, is entitled “Chromatin activation as a unifying principle underlying pathogenic mechanisms in multiple myeloma”. Using a multi-epigenomics approach and integrative computational analyses as well as detailed functional experiments, the authors identified the existence of a core epigenomic landscape underlying MM pathogenesis. This chromatin landscape is mostly characterized by the widespread activation of regulatory elements that remain inactive in normal cells. Such activation, seems to be mediated by the action of specific TF families, affecting genes particularly involved in preventing cell death associated with cellular stress, such as TXN and PRDM5. As chromatin activation seems to be a feature of myeloma patients as a whole, these findings suggests that drugs reverting this epigenetic process may be appropriate as a backbone treatment for this aggressive disease. (Read more)