In the present study, a total of 70 CLL patients (35 IGHV-unmutated samples + 35 IGHV-mutated samples) were included. All patients were diagnosed according to recently revised criteria [25 (link)] and the tumor samples were collected at the time of diagnosis. The patients in the study were included from different hematology departments in the western part of Sweden after written consent had been obtained. Only CLL peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) samples with a tumor percentage of leukemic cells ≥70 % were selected in this study. Clinical and molecular data are summarized in Additional file 1A and B. PBMCs from peripheral blood of age-matched normal healthy controls was prepared using the Ficoll extraction method and normal CD+19 positive sorted B cell DNA from eight healthy age-matched controls were bought from a company (3H Biomedicum, Uppsala, Sweden). Two CLL cell lines (HG3 [26 (link)] and MEC1 [27 (link)]) and one Burkitt lymphoma B cell line (RAMOS) [28 (link)] were used for DAC treatment experiments. All cell lines were cultured in RPMI 1640 with glutamine (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, USA) supplemented with 10 % fetal bovine serum and 1× penicillin/streptomycin (FBS; Invitrogen, Carlsbad, USA).
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