Leukemia is maintained by leukemia stem cells (LSCs) that are capable of unlimited self-renewal. The ability to selectively destroy these LSCs would be a powerful therapeutic approach. In order to better understand how the LSCs are regulated, HSCI Principal Faculty member Scott Armstrong and colleagues studied the genetic pathways involved in self-renewal of LSCs in mouse models of acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) and found that the Wnt/beta-catenin pathway was required for self-renewal in LSCs derived from hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and another cell type called the granulocyte-macrophage progenitors, but is not required for self-renewal in normal adult HSCs. These finding suggest that targeting the Wnt/beta-catenin pathway may represent an exciting therapeutic approach for the treatment of AML.

Wang, Y., Krivtsov, A.V., Sinha, A.U., North, T.E., Goessling, W., Feng, Z., Zon, L.I., Armstrong, S.A. (2010). The Wnt/beta-catenin pathway is required for the development of leukemia stem cells in AML. Science 327, 1650-3.