The treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is one of the great success stories in oncology. However, patients who fail to achieve remission or relapse after chemotherapy continue to have a very poor prognosis, and the mechanisms underlying therapy failures are largely unknown. A new study suggests that gain-of-function mutations in NT5C2, a gene that encodes an enzyme that metabolizes chemotherapeutic drugs used against ALL, contribute to chemotherapy resistance (pages 368–371).
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Aster, J., DeAngelo, D. Resistance revealed in acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Nat Med 19, 264–265 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3119
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3119
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