PML and leukemia: Because NEAT1 has been proposed to control several biological processes, including the stress response [21] and cellular differentiation [15], we therefore initially examined the expression level of NEAT1 in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from 31 cases with de novo APL (13 males and 18 females with a median age of 28.5 years and a range of 17–52 years) expressing the PML-RARα fusion gene, which is characterized by leukemia blasts blocked at the promyelocyte stage of differentiation.