The different flavors and splices of MCL

Abstract

Even in ugly diseases like mantle cell lymphoma (MCL), it is impossible to ignore the beauty of the logical order regulating biological processes: kinases are regulated by phosphorylation, protease activity by proteolytical cleavage, and so forth. In this issue of Blood, Pararajalingam et al identified perturbed RNA processing due to alternative splicing from somatic mutations in intronic regions of a gene that encodes for an RNA binding protein (HNRNPH1 [Heterogeneous Nuclear Ribonucleoprotein H1]) in MCL.1 This adds another candidate to the growing list of alterations that determine the heterogeneous biology, distinct clinical courses, and differences in treatment outcomes of patients with this disease.