Funded by The Little Princess Trust and administered by CCLG
Lead investigator: Dr Samanta Mariani, The University of Edinburgh
Award: £140,214.54
Awarded March 2023
Leukaemia is the most common type of cancer in children. When it develops quickly, it is called acute leukaemia and is very difficult to treat. Only half of babies, under one years old, can be cured with chemotherapy. We need to know how leukaemia develops in these infants to better understand how and why it starts and is so hard to treat.
New research suggests that a type of immune system cell, called a macrophage, could be key to making chemotherapy work better. Whilst macrophages should normally attack cancer cells, leukaemia can ‘corrupt’ them, causing them to help the cancer cells survive and spread. In adult leukaemia models, killing the leukaemia-associated macrophages makes the cancer much more susceptible to chemotherapy. However, this hasn’t been studied in infant leukaemia.
Dr Samanta Mariani at the University of Edinburgh wants to find out more. Her project aims to understand if leukaemia-associated macrophages, and other immune cells, are also present in infant leukaemia and if they play a role in the cancer. If her team can find out more about how leukaemia cells interact with nearby immune cells, Dr Mariani hopes to find a way to change these interactions so that they no longer help the leukaemia grow and spread.