Flooding along the river

Rock-a-bye bone marrow Chemotherapy saves the lives of many cancer patients. However, it is a difficult treatment that induces many major side effects, with one of the most common being myelosuppression—depletion of bone marrow cells. The consequences of myelosuppression include anemia, thrombocytopenia, and neutropenia, all of which can cause severe complications and delay subsequent courses of chemotherapy. Taylor et al. discovered that quizartinib, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, can decrease the risk of myelosuppression during cancer treatment by transiently suppressing the proliferation of bone marrow progenitor cells. In mice with leukemia, cancer cells continued to proliferate during treatment, making them a target for chemotherapy even when the bone marrow was protected. —YN