Investigating how regulatory regions of the genome communicate with cancer causing genes

Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is the most common childhood cancer, affecting over 650 children and young adults in the UK each year. Current treatments cure around 90% of children, but this comes at a significant cost: side-effects include heart, thyroid, lung and fertility problems. In addition to this, the outlook for children whose leukaemia returns remains poor. 

Regulatory regions of our DNA are responsible for interacting with genes and switching them on and off. In healthy cells, regulatory regions carefully control important genes at the correct time to allow cells to complete their job. Some patients with leukaemia have errors in their DNA that lead to these regulatory regions switching on the wrong gene. Because there are a lot of genes involved in these errors, it is hard to develop ways of killing the cancer cells and most of these errors cannot be specifically blocked by current medicines.  

Recently the research team at the University of Newcastle, led by Dr Lisa Russell, have proposed a new model that helps to understand how these regulatory regions switch on the wrong gene. Now they want to investigate how these regulatory regions and the genes they switch on are communicating with each other, so that they can develop new treatments targeting their interaction in cancer cells. Although many of the genes that are incorrectly turned on or off are involved, there are only a few regulatory regions controlling them. If there was a way to switch these misplaced regulatory regions off, it could stop the cancer cells growing. Dr Lisa Russell hopes that this could benefit many children with a wide range of blood cancers. The final goal of this research is to design drugs that stop the regulatory regions communicating with the wrong genes. Treatment targeting this communication should reduce side effects as it only targets the leukaemia cells and not normal body cells.