Prognostic relevance of disordered epigenetic regulation in juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia

Juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML) is a myeloproliferative disorder of early childhood which takes a fatal course in most cases unless treated with hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. We recently provided evidence for epigenetic dysregulation in JMML and showed that aberrant DNA methylation at defined loci strongly correlates with disease progression and outcome. We have now extended the methylation analysis to genome-wide scale (MCIp-Seq) and find that unsupervised clustering based on aberrantly methylated DNA fragments robustly identifies two patient clusters. To obtain a quantitative high-resolution…