Professor of Internal Medicine, Division of Hematology
Mayo Clinic
Rochester, Minnesota
Mrinal M. Patnaik, MD is a Physician Scientist with the Division of Hematology and an Professor in the Department of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, MN), with a specific interest in epigenetic dysregulation in myeloid neoplasms, specifically Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia (CMML). CMML is an aggressive malignancy associated with a high morbidity and mortality, and in great need of new treatment options. Dr. Patnaik has carried out important preclinical and prognostic work in CMML and has importantly demonstrated the high prevalence of epigenetic and chromatin dysregulation along with the negative prognostic impact of mutations such as ASXL1 (aggressive disease phenotype and shortened overall survival). This work has led to the development of the Mayo Molecular Model (Leukemia 2014); a contemporary prognostic model for patients with CMML that now is applied worldwide. In July 2015, he was awarded the NIH CTSA KL-2 scholar award to further his work in CMML and have used this time and mentoring to define the interplay in the genomic and epigenetic landscape of proliferative and dysplastic CMML subtypes. They have carried out important epigenetic studies (RNA seq, ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, DIP-seq) on primary CMML samples and have identified potential therapeutic targets. In addition, Dr. Patnaik is the principal investigator of a large CMML biorepository at Mayo Clinic, which contains blood and bone marrow samples on over 700 patients (DNA, RNA, protein, chromatin and viably frozen cells). He is also the director for the Center for individualized Medicine Epigenomics program and oversees the Epigenomics Developmental Laboratory.