Omics points to drivers of myeloid cancer, long COVID; plus ILC2 cell therapies and more

A pair of studies in Cell and Science this week highlighted the use of -omics tools to uncover underlying disease biology.

By analyzing rare genomic variants in the U.K. Biobank, a Boston Children’s Hospital group led by Vijay Sankaran identified a transcriptional elongation regulator CTR9 in which loss-of-function mutations increased the risk of developing myeloid cancers about 10-fold. The authors showed the mutations, which they estimated are present in 0.1% of individuals, promote hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) expansion by increasing transcriptional elongation in these cells, and believe modulation of HSC expansion in at-risk individuals could enable cancer prevention. ...