Methylation Alterations And Advance Of Treatment In Lymphoma

Lymphoma is a common and aggressive form of hematopoietic malignancies with diverse clinical and pathological features dueto its heterogeneity. Although the current immunochemotherapeutic regimens improve clin-ical outcomes, many patients still display poor prognosis and frequent relapse. Epigenetic alterations contribute to the progression of lymphoma. DNA methylation and hi-stone methylation are the most common epigenetic alter-ations and regulate the gene expression involved in lym-phoma pathogenesis, including silencing of tumor suppres-sor genes or activation of proto-oncogenes. Dysregula-tion or mutation of genes related to DNA methylation, in-cluding DNMTs, TET2, IDH2, and genes related to histone methylation, including EZH2, KMT2D has been observed. Most of these alterations are associated with inferior out -comes of patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DL-BCL), follicular lymphoma (FL), peripheral T-cell lym-phoma (PTCL), and other subtypes of lymphoma. To over-come the pathogenetic consequence induced by aberrant DNA methylation and histone methylation, novel targeted drugs including azacitidine and decitabine have been grad-ually applied in practice to enhance the efficacy of current therapy and improve the prognosis of lymphoma patients. Investigating and targeting epigenetic mechanisms in lym-phoma could be a key point of future research. Therefore, we mainly summarize the methylation alterations in lym-phoma and their respective targeted therapies in this review.