24/7 monitoring tools to track myeloid leukaemia cells and target its cells with acute precision!

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Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) is the second most common blood cancer after acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL).

While 90% of the children with ALL are cured, this is true for only 60% of those with AML despite the fact that patients will often undergo much more toxic therapies, with severe long-term effects for survivors.

This is why this project is looking for better therapies to help young patients with AML.

In the field of ALL, treatments were improved thanks to the development of highly sensitive genomic technologies to monitor the response of leukaemia to therapy: the amazing sensitivity of these technologies to detect MRD (“measurable” or “minimal” residual disease), opens the way to a personalised adjustment of the treatment.

In practice, a child with an excellent response to therapy (translated by very low to negative MRD), requires less toxic chemotherapy to achieve remission. Conversely, a child with a weak response to initial therapy (translated by a high MRD), will require an intensive chemotherapy and possibly the addition of a bone marrow transplant.

In paediatric AML, one of the big challenges is the lack of highly sensitive methodologies to detect the response of the leukaemia cells to therapy by similar genomic approaches.

This project proposes a novel genomic based methodology to overcome this challenge. This project will utilise this novel approach to not only identify response to therapy but also to characterise the leukemic cells that remain resistant to therapy. This could also lead to identification of novel drugs that may beat this resistance.

This project is a collaboration between two investigators with complementary skills: one internationally renowned computational genomic expert and one well-known paediatric leukaemia physician-scientist.

Thanks to the team’s close connections with the ITCC network, the methodologies developed in this project will be swiftly translated and disseminated among the leukaemia community. The development of the monitoring tools proposed by this project will hopefully lead to a precise adjustment of therapy for each child with AML and, consequently, to improve their chances to cure.