What can a precancerous condition teach us about clearing mutations? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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A precancerous condition of the bone marrow called myelofibrosis is usually treated with bone marrow transplantation. Now a new study shows that looking at the mutations that people with the condition have in their own bone marrow and then assessing them after the transplant can predict how successful it might be. Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson has more.

Nelson: What this group did was to look at folks, there were 24 of them, who had myelofibrosis who were going to undergo the allogeneic bone marrow transplant. They knew they had new mutations, new gene defects, and they used that as a measure of whether the disease was still present. They looked 30 days later,100 days later and 180 days later. Were the mutations still present? At 100 days 63% of the ones with JAK 2 mutations and even higher levels of the ones the other mutations the mutation was gone.  :30

Nelson says such monitoring of mutations is also a part of clinical assessments of cancer treatments and it likely to become more common. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.