Killing dormant leukaemia cells to stop relapse

Leukaemia is the most common type of childhood cancer and causes uncontrolled growth of abnormal white blood cells (which are normally used by the immune system to fight infections). Current drug treatment for patients with leukaemia work by killing fast growing ‘proliferative’ cancerous cells, and fortunately many children at this stage recover and are cured. However, slow growing leukaemia cells that are not killed-off by this initial treatment may lie dormant for months or years, but then can grow rapidly. At this point survival of patients with relapsed leukaemia is unfortunately much lower. Consequently, more research is needed to help identify new treatments which can target these cancerous cells at the dormant stage.

Dr Thompson’s project will attempt to identify and test drugs which are able to kill dormant leukaemia cells but allow normal cells to grow. They have based their study on knowledge that the dormant leukaemia cells rely on specific genes and proteins (substances which have varied functions in the cells within the body) to survive. The team will examine cell lines and samples from patients with childhood leukaemia to identify differences between the ‘cell-surface proteins’ of dormant compared with proliferative cells. This will help them to identify which genes are active or inactive in the dormant cells, information which can be used to identify which drugs could potentially be used as a treatment.

Many of the drugs being tested in this study are already approved by the government and used to treat other conditions (e.g. diabetes). Approved drugs identified as being able to kill dormant leukaemia but not normal blood cells during these experiments will be put forward for potential use by clinicians to treat leukaemia patients along with their current medication. It is hoped that findings from this project will help contribute to more children with leukaemia being cured of their disease through use of treatments that have less side-effects.