Acute leukemia is an aggressive blood cancer that requires accurate diagnosis to guide treatment. Current diagnostic methods, which rely on a combination of molecular and cytogenetic tests, often take days or even weeks to complete. MARLIN, however, can provide results in as little as two hours from the time of biopsy. By providing rapid and detailed insights into leukemia subtypes, MARLIN could enable clinicians to make treatment decisions sooner and with more complete information.

“Ultimately, we envision that methylation-based acute leukemia classifications will complement standard-of-care diagnostic tests to provide more comprehensive and timely information to pathologists, clinicians, and patients,” said Dr. Volker Hovestadt, a computational biologist at Dana-Farber, associate institute member at Broad Institute and co-senior author of the study.