NIH Expert: Field of Hematopathology Has Changed Significantly Over the Past Decade, With Advances in Genetic Approaches

Pharmacy Times interviewed Elaine Jaffe, MD, National Institutes of Health (NIH) distinguished investigator at the National Cancer Institute at NIH, who is receiving the American Society for Investigative Pathology Gold-Headed Cane Award and is presenting an award lecture at the Experimental Biology 2022 conference on the classification of lymphoma in the modern era—a marriage of pathology and genomics.

During this interview, Jaffe discussed how the field of hematopathology has changed over the past decade.

Elaine Jaffe: I mean, the field of hematopathology has changed significantly over the past decade. We've really seen advances in genetic approaches.

Years ago, we had PCR to detect lineage and clonality and FISH, fluorescence in situ hybridization, to detect recurrent translocations. But now we have many new tools that emphasize genomic approaches.

So, there are single gene mutations that are highly recurrent and associated with specific entities, and there are targeted sequencing panels that we can now use to classify acute leukemia, both B-cell and T-cell lymphomas, and the introduction of whole exome sequencing and RNA-Seq has expanded the tools that we have at our disposal.