Treatments for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia

Vera Sofia Correia Martins

Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Portugal

T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T-ALL) is a very aggressive type of blood cancer that originates from a type of cells of the immune system, the T-lymphocytes. It affects mostly children, but can also occur in adolescents and adults. Although it is curable in 80 % of children and 60 % of adults, treatment causes severe secondary side effects. This means that, currently, 2 out of 10 children and 4 out of 10 adults diagnosed with T-ALL fail to respond to treatment. In addition, the disease re-emerges in some of the patients that initially respond well and for them the prognosis is poor.

Current therapies are clearly insufficient, and should become specific to avoid secondary side effects and relapse. Such technical advances require a better understanding of the mechanisms that trigger leukaemia, as well as disease relapse. Furthermore, biomarkers are also needed to identify, at the time of diagnosis, which patients will respond to the treatment offered and which will not.

To this end, the researchers propose an innovative approach that combines mouse and humanised mouse models to reveal the process whereby healthy immune cells become cancerous, as well as to better understand how they resist treatment and reappear in relapse. In this project, they propose to identify and characterise the fundamental mechanisms that explain both the earliest events that trigger leukaemia, as well as those that enable relapse, thereby paving the way to developing novel and more effective therapies.

Klaus-Michael Debatin, Ulm University Medical Center, Germany

T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia: Origin & Relapse

€681,932.54