EPO and anemia (phenotype): Erythropoietin (EPO), the master hormone regulating red blood cell (RBC) formation is commonly used in the clinics to treat anemia in patients with chronic kidney disease (Cernaro et al., 2019), heart failure (Anand and Gupta, 2018), and cancer (Cornes et al., 2007; Gilreath et al., 2014).