A recent publication in Blood from the Hodson lab describes the results of a UK collaboration between CSCI, the Sanger Institute, the Haematological Malignancies Research Network (HMRN) at the University of York and the Haematological Malignancies Diagnostic Service (HMDS) in Leeds. The authors used targeted sequencing of biopsies from nearly a thousand patients with Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL) to reveal that DLBCL exists not as a single disease, but rather as several distinct molecular subtypes. These subtypes have different outcomes when treated with standard therapy allowing the use of genomic data to predict prognosis. The different subtypes also show activation of distinct biological pathways when examined by gene expression profiling. This suggests that each will respond differently to novel biologically targeted therapies and may in the future allow us to tailor therapy to an individual patients. Ongoing research in the Hodson laboratory uses functional modelling approaches to identify which of the many targeted therapies in development for lymphoma would be most effectively targeted at each molecular subtype of DLBCL.
