In the past couple of years, targeting of dihydroorotate dehydrogenase (DHODH), a key enzyme in the de novo pyrimidine synthesis pathway, has gained increasing attention following a seminal paper by Sykes et al. (2016) demonstrating that acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) cells could undergo differentiation upon DHODH inhibition. Here, DHODH is linked to acute myeloid leukemia.