HMOX1 and acute promyelocytic leukemia: To confirm that NRF2 inhibition is involved in the mechanism of enhanced sensitivity to the ascorbate of APL cells we treated the two different cellular systems with ASC 1 mM and measured NRF2 and HO-1 protein expression and found that the presence of PML/RARa downgraded NRF2 protein quantity and downregulated HO-1 protein (Figure 4c,d).