Immunity in acute myeloid leukemia: Where the immune response and targeted therapy meet.

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a highly aggressive disease with high relapse and mortality rates. Recent years have shown a surge in novel therapeutic development for AML, both in clinical and preclinical stages. These developments include targeted therapies based on AML-specific molecular signatures as well as more general immune modulation and vaccination studies. In this review, we will explore the evolving arena of AML therapy and suggest some intriguing connections between immune system modulation and targeted therapy. Improved understanding of the immune system involvement in various stages of the disease and the crosstalk between immune effectors, targeted therapy, and AML cells can provide a better framework for designing the next generation of AML therapies.

Somatic epimutations enable single-cell lineage tracing in native hematopoiesis across the murine and human lifespan.

Current approaches to lineage tracing of stem cell clones require genetic engineering or rely on sparse somatic DNA variants, which are difficult to capture at single-cell resolution. Here, we show that targeted single-cell measurements of DNA methylation at single-CpG resolution deliver joint information about cellular differentiation state and clonal identities. We develop EPI-clone, a droplet-based method for transgene-free lineage tracing, and apply it to study hematopoiesis, capturing hundreds of clonal trajectories across almost 100,000 single-cells. Using ground-truth genetic barcodes, we demonstrate that EPI-clone accurately identifies clonal lineages throughout hematopoietic differentiation. Applied to unperturbed hematopoiesis, we describe an overall decline of clonal complexity during murine ageing and the expansion of rare low-output stem cell clones. In aged human donors, we identified expanded hematopoietic clones with and without genetic lesions, and various degrees of clonal complexity. Taken together, EPI-clone enables accurate and transgene-free single-cell lineage tracing at scale.