Gerda Egger

TL;DR: Great potential lies in the development of ‘epigenetic therapies’ — several inhibitors of enzymes controlling epigenetic modifications, specifically DNA methyltransferases and histone deacetylases, have shown promising anti-tumorigenic effects for some malignancies.

TL;DR: Results suggest that DNA demethylation and histone deacetylase inhibition can activate expression of miRNAs that may act as tumor suppressors.

TL;DR: This work developed a chromatin scanning technique called ChAP, coupling the chromatin immunoprecipitation assay with arbitrarily primed PCR, which allows for the rapid and unbiased comparison of histone modification patterns within the eukaryotic nucleus, and suggests that the large transcribed regions of human genes are maintained in a deacetylated conformation in regions read by elongating polymerase.

TL;DR: The data suggest that the two silencing mechanisms act in parallel to reprogram the cancer epigenome and that DNA hypermethylation may replace Polycomb-based repression near key regulatory genes, possibly reducing their regulatory plasticity.

TL;DR: This work reviews aberrant epigenetic modifications in normal and cancer cells and the evolving approaches used to study them and outlines advances in their potential use for cancer diagnostics and targeted epigenetic therapy.