On your marks

With less fanfare than the first two waves, a quiet rise in activity is driving a revival of interest in epigenetics, despite little progress in solving the fundamental challenges that have dogged the field from the start.

Although a host of new chromatin-regulators have been identified over the last five years, few of the targets have been touched by drug developers. Instead, preclinical innovation has been springboarding off positive clinical data by devising workarounds to selectively hit validated targets and explore uses for them beyond cancer (see "New Epigenetic Targets")...