Developing innovative models to support research for kinder treatments for B cell lymphoma

B cell Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (BNHL) when diagnosed in children has a good outcome with survival in excess of 95%. However, the side-effects of chemotherapy are significant with both short and long-term problems, and children that either do not respond to treatment or who relapse have a dismal outcome with less than 30% surviving. We have tried lots of different ways of improving this situation by changing chemotherapy regimens but have not been successful in making any improvements.

Fortunately, children that are refractory/relapse with BNHL are rare, but this creates a clinical problem as we are not able to conduct clinical trials with such small numbers of patients and therefore the situation will not improve. Additionally, on the whole, drug companies are not interested in running clinical trials for new treatments with children. However, the Accelerate platform was initiated to force drug companies to work with doctors to bring their novel treatment to children with cancer.

The first trial to be commissioned by the platform is the Glo-BNHL trial, an international trial that will recruit children across the globe with relapse BNHL and assign them to the trial to receive a novel therapy. We are requesting funds to conduct biological studies alongside the trial to improve our understanding of this cancer, to determine why some children relapse, to develop ways to monitor their response to treatment and to model their treatment with mice. Tumour samples will be grown in mice and treated like the children to predict response to therapy and to evaluate relapse should it arise. In particular, we will ‘humanise’ the mice so that they have a human immune system. In this manner, we can model how the children will respond to a type of treatment that harnesses the child’s immune system to kill the cancer cells.