Endosteal vessel integrity: a new therapeutic goal in acute myeloid leukemia?

In acute myeloid leukemia (AML) the cure rate of elderly and some molecularly normal patients below 60 years of age is still 5–15% and about 60–80% patients still die due to chemo-resistance. Thus, in AML there is an urgent need to develop more effective treatments that should target not only the AML cell but also the specialized bone marrow (BM) microenvironment (“the niche”) whose critical role has been progressively defined (1-3).