Funded by CCLG and CCLG Special Named Funds including Fight ALL Together, #TeamMax ALL Fund, Arabella’s Leukaemia (ALL) Research Fund, Stand with Sofia, Elliott’s Warrior Fund, Toti Worboys Fund, Harley James Reynolds Fund, Josh’s Gold Star Fund, Fred Bennett’s ‘Don’t Look Down’ Fund, Henry Gloag Fund, and Eden’s Fierce Fight
Lead investigator: Dr Elitza Deltcheva, University College London, Cancer Institute
Award: £15,000.00
Awarded February 2024
B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (B-ALL) is the most common cancer in children. Although around 90% of children can be cured, they have to undergo harsh chemotherapy treatments. These can leave children with long term, debilitating side-effects. Unfortunately, the cancer grows back for around 10% of children and is even harder to treat.
The best way to predict whether a child with B-ALL can be cured is to look at whether cancer cells are still alive after the first 4 weeks of treatment. If we could understand more about the properties of these cells, it could lead to new strategies to eradicate them and higher cure rates.
Dr Elitza Deltcheva and her team from University College London believe that, if they can identify specific vulnerabilities of these cells, it could lead to targeted treatments. This would help lower the reliance on existing chemotherapies and reduce toxicity for patients.
In her project, Dr Deltcheva plans to use her team’s understanding of chemotherapy resistance to predict which leukaemia cells will survive treatment. She will then develop strategies to identify and isolate those cells using a technique called flow cytometry. This can separate mixtures of cells into groups based on proteins on the cell surface, called ‘markers’, that differ between cell types. Flow cytometry is already used to help diagnose different types of leukaemia, so Dr Deltcheva can start by working with known leukaemia markers.
She will then add her team’s chemotherapy resistance markers and, using samples from the VIVO biobank, test whether her panel of markers can identify chemotherapy resistant leukaemia cells. By testing the panel with multiple leukaemia samples, Dr Deltcheva will refine the panel to only include the more informative markers.
Dr Deltcheva ultimately hopes to identify groups of markers that can identify chemotherapy resistant cells. This would provide the foundations for future research. It could lead to new treatments and diagnostic tools, allowing doctors to monitor and predict a patient’s response to chemotherapy and adapt their treatment accordingly.
Project updates
Download the announcement PDF here.