HDAC9 and acute myeloid leukemia: In AML, we recently demonstrated that Smac mimetics alone or in combination with standard chemotherapeutic drugs such as cytarabine or epigenetic modifiers (i.e. demethylating agents, histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors) can overcome apoptosis resistance of AML cells by inducing necroptosis as an alternative mode of programmed cell death [17, 24, 39, 40].