Issue Archive

In this issue of Blood, Lambert and colleagues propose a new disease paradigm for one of the CMPNs, ET. They show that in ET, the JAK2 V617F mutation occurs as multiple independent events.¹  Using a common single nucleotide polymorphism located in the JAK2 gene, they demonstrate that the mutation commonly occurs on both alleles in ET. The authors argue that, because of these new findings, the presence of the JAK2 V617F in ET should not be equated with malignant disease.

In this issue of Blood, results from the Longitudinal Investigation of Thromboembolism (LITE)¹  show that, of the coagulant factors IX through XIII, only elevated levels of procoagulant factor XI were associated with a first venous thrombosis. LITE is the first prospective cohort study reporting on all these factors. Factor IX initially appeared to be associated with thrombosis but, after adjustment for primarily body mass index, the association disappeared.

In this issue of Blood, Burns and colleagues analyzed samples from 18 patients with melanoma, treated with T lymphocytes gene-modified to express a tumor-specific TCR. Results show persistence of transduced cells, but early shutdown of TCR gene expression. Transgene down-regulation was not caused by epigenetic silencing and could be reversed by T-cell activation.

In this issue of Blood, Chari and colleagues provide a novel mechanism for the unique negative regulatory role of PKCδ in platelet dense granule release downstream of collagen signaling.

In this issue of Blood, Eberhard and colleagues screen a large library of off-patent agents for down-regulation of the survivin promoter in HeLa cells. Their most specific “hit” was ciclopirox, formerly developed as an antifungal, which was found to have preclinical antileukemic activity possibly via depletion of intracellular iron.

Using double cytokine knockout donor CD4 cells, in this issue of Blood, Yi and colleagues help clarify the complex role of IFN-γ and the tissue specificity of Th1, Th17, and Th2 subsets in murine GVHD.¹