Myeloma's IRF4 Addiction

A paper published in Nature suggests that inhibiting interferon regulatory factor 4 could be useful for treating multiple myeloma (MM). Although the study identified the transcription factor as a regulator of several gene pathways central to myeloma cell survival, a challenge will be finding a way to target it without disrupting its role in lymphocyte activation.

The study, led by researchers at NIH's National Cancer Institute(NCI), used a loss-of-function genetic screen in which small hairpin RNAs were screened for their ability to block cancer cell proliferation and survival. The screen found that myeloma cells receiving an shRNA targeting the coding region of interferon regulatory factor 4 (IRF4) were depleted from cultures by up to eightfold compared with that of cells receiving different shRNAs...