The rationale to evaluate the impact of VPA pre-treatment consisted of the observation that VPA and all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA) confer sensitivity of FLT3-ITD-expressing leukemia cells towards the mTOR inhibitor rapamycin and the hypothesis of potential non-genomic effects of such histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors as VPA. The gene discussed is MTOR; the disease is leukemia.