Identifying new treatment options for Burkitt lymphoma that doesn’t respond to treatment

Burkitt lymphoma is a rare type of childhood blood cancer with harsh treatments. Whilst the current treatment works well, it is very intensive and difficult for patients to manage. Any attempt to reduce the amount of treatment results in an unacceptably high risk of the cancer coming back after treatment (relapsing). When this happens, there are very few treatment options for patients and doctors can rarely cure them. Finding effective and kinder treatment options is vital to improve care for children with Burkitt lymphoma. However, we understand very little about the causes of relapse.

Dr Simon Bomken at Newcastle University has been working on Burkitt lymphoma samples collected by the CCLG Tissue Bank.  He has used these samples to create models that behave like Burkitt lymphoma, and that new treatments can be tested on to understand more about why treatments sometimes don’t work.

In this project, his team is continuing that work to get one step closer to helping these young patients. They will use new ways to grow lymphoma cells in the lab and create better models, then look at which genes are crucial to the cancer cells’ survival. This will identify genes which would be good targets for new treatments. The researchers will then test medicines that work against the crucial genes, alongside normal chemotherapy, to find out which should be researched further.

Using these approaches, Dr Bomken hopes that they will identify new treatment options suitable for future clinical trials. He believes that choosing these new treatments on the basis of scientific understanding gives the best chance that they will be effective for children with relapsed Burkitt lymphoma.