Funded by CCLG and CCLG Special Named Funds including Ruby’s ‘Live Kindly, Live Loudly’ Fund, Fred Bennett’s ‘Don’t Look Down’ Fund, Elin’s Sparkle Fund, Toti Worboys Fund, Harley James Reynolds Fund, Josh’s Gold Star, and Seren’s ALL Stars
Lead investigator: Professor Anthony Moorman, Newcastle University
Award: £93,211.00
Awarded January 2023
Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is a treatable a type of blood cancer where many children and young people can be cured. However, successful treatment relies on being able to choose which treatment is best. For example, low-risk patients with should receive standard chemotherapy but high-risk patients, who are more likely to not respond to treatment or to have their cancer return after treatment, should receive more aggressive chemotherapy and sometimes need a bone marrow transplant.
To improve treatment, we to know more about which risk factors doctors can use to decide which patients should be in the high-risk group. Whilst there hasn’t been research on this yet, the Leukaemia Research Cytogenetics Group (LRCG) has collected genetic information and clinical data about over 20,000 patients treated on UK clinical trials in the past 30 years. By combining this in-depth genetic data with information from the trials about patient outcomes, the LRCG found several new genetic errors that makes ALL more high-risk.
In this project, Professor Anthony Moorman and his team at Newcastle University will be analysing the patients with these high-risk genetic errors in the LRCG’s huge dataset. They hope to find out which other factors have an effect on whether a high-risk patient’s treatment is successful. The factors they are looking at include age, sex, the number of white blood cells a patient has, their initial response to treatment, and what treatment they had.
This research project will generate high-quality information that can help doctors correctly assess which risk group a patient should be in, and therefore which treatment they need.
Professor Anthony Moorman hopes that this information will be included in the next clinical trial for ALL, so it can help discover the best treatments for high-risk patients and influence the way children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and high-risk genetics are treated in the future.