What does the term genetics mean and why is it relevant to patients with AML? So leukemia is a cancer of the bone marrow. The bone marrow are these stem cells that are responsible for making all of our blood cells, the red blood cells that carry oxygen, the white blood cells that fight infection and the platelets that clot the blood. And in order to be these different types of cells, a hematopoietic stem cell, a bone marrow stem cell needs to read the genetic information inside the cell and turn on genes that are important for its lineage specification, for what type of cell it's ultimately going to be and turn off other genes that are unnecessary. What happens in many types of cancer is there is some sort of alteration or mutation in the actual instruction manual, the genetic code. That mutation changes the way that that stem cell is able to respond and effectively turn on the right genes. And so what ends up happening sometimes is there are really two sort of classes classically that we think of with regards to genetic abnormalities in all cancers, but in particular leukemia. There are mutations that turn on a gene that's responsible for growth and cell division. We call those oncogenes. The metaphor most commonly used, the gas pedal that stuck to the floor. These cells now continue to grow without respect to the instructions of the environment around it. Those instructions are really important. If somebody was bleeding, they would need to make lots more red blood cells to replace them. So that gas pedal function is really important. If somebody had an infection, you want to make more white blood cells. So that gas pedal function is really important. The other class are what we call tumor suppressor genes. The metaphor, again, using the car is that the brake pedal doesn't work. And so these checkpoints that a cell would go through to make sure that the DNA has copied properly and that the cell is ready for division now are bypassed. And so typically this can result in the wrong genes being expressed or more commonly the cell will go through a cell division without picking up some of the mistakes or the challenges. All these mutations, all of this genetic information is changing the way that that bone marrow stem cell is able to function. And now it no longer can differentiate or mature into the types of cells it needs to be. And it starts to grow irrespective of its environment. And ultimately that's what causes leukemia and cancer.