What is the purpose of genetic testing in AML?

So genetic testing in AML is really important because it does two things for us. One is it tells us about what we expect that that particular person's leukemia is likely to act in terms of its prognosis and its response to treatment. And so we have several genetic pieces of information that we need to get at the very beginning of diagnosing and developing a treatment plan. Because these pieces of information are going to color not only what is this patient's prognosis but also how likely are they to respond to different types of therapeutic interventions. Most commonly for cancer we still nowadays use chemotherapy. Drugs and treatments aim to kill dividing cells. What we've learned over the last four to five decades is that some mutations make a leukemia more sensitive to chemotherapy, which is great. Because that helps us to know if a patient has a very chemo sensitive leukemia, what kind of mileage we can expect from getting a patient through a very tough chemotherapeutic regimen. Whereas there are some mutations that will tell us that, you know what, we may not expect to get very far with just chemotherapy alone. And so we need to be a little bit more thoughtful, a little more strategic, and a little bit more creative in how we develop a treatment plan.