Eirini Papapetrou, MD, PhD (Damon Runyon-Edward P. Evans Foundation Innovator '13-'16) of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, reported the results of a technique called cellular reprogramming that takes mature blood cells from patients with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and reprograms them back into stem cells to study the genetic origins of MDS. MDS is a rare blood cancer that can progress into acute leukemia; its causes are not well understood. Her team was able to define a region on chromosome 7 that is critical to MDS and identify candidate genes in the region that may underlie the disease. The findings were published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
