Can Leukaemia be Traced Back to The Womb?

A team of scientists have said that they have traced the root genetic cause of the cancer, leukaemia back to the time a baby is in the womb. The Institute of Cancer Research experts looked in detail at the entire three billion letter sequence of DNA-coding in identical twins to try to discover what sets off the disease. The authors hope that the findings, published in PNAS journal, could lead to brand new drugs and treatments that could fight the leukaemia before it has a chance to develop properly.

 

Leukaemia, a highly debilitating condition, is the most common cancer diagnosed in children. It affects a third of young cancer sufferers and kills over 100 children a year in the United Kingdom alone.

 

The twins who were studied in the research had the most common form of leukaemia which affects children, known as Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL) which is when the cancer grows in the white blood cells.

 

It has been known for a long time that there are multiple faulty genes which are linked to the condition. It is also true that environmental factors can probably act as triggers along the way. But the precise sequence of events leading up to a diagnosis of ALL is unclear, and scientists are looking for a breakthrough in our understanding.

 

The authors of the study wanted to find out more about the disease so that it would be easier for other researchers to find better treatments at some point in the future. Although ALL can often be curable, the medicines and drugs that are used to treat it can cause unpleasant and sometimes severe side effects making the need for an alternative quite pressing.

Can Leukaemia be Traced Back to The Womb?

Categories: cancer, Children, condition, leukaemia, nbsp, origins, womb

Gene-Modifying Treatment Halts Cancer in Five Patients

Scientists have announced that their new treatment has led to complete remission in five cancer patients, with no detectable cancerous cells being left to threaten their wellbeing. The patients’ wellness had already suffered a serious relapse of B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a form of cancer of the white blood cells, before they were given transfusions of their own immune cells that had been genetically modified with an extra cancer-fighting gene.

Renier Brentjens of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York and lead author of the study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, explained, ‘Patients with relapsed B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia resistant to chemotherapy have a particularly poor prognosis. This ability of our approach to achieve complete remissions in all of these very sick patients is what makes these findings so remarkable and this novel therapy so promising.’

He continued, ‘By serving as a bridge to stem-cell transplants, this therapy could potentially help cure adult patients with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia that has relapsed and who are chemotherapy resistant. Otherwise, these patients have a virtually incurable disease.’ He added, ‘We need to examine the effectiveness of this targeted immunotherapy in additional patients before it could potentially become a standard treatment for patients with relapsed B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.’

Professor Paul Moss, who runs the Birmingham Cancer Research UK Centre and was not involved with the study, noted that this small study’s results demonstrate why so many researchers are excited about immunotherapy’s potential. ‘Although this treatment may not itself be a cure, it does seem to be able to produce remissions in patients whose [cancer] has relapsed. This can then make patients eligible for stem cell transplantation – which can lead to a cure,’ he said.

‘It’s just one of several similar approaches being tested in clinical trials around the world, including here in the UK,’ he added. ‘Although it’s early days for these trials, the approach of modifying a patient’s T-cells [white blood cells] to attack their cancer is looking increasingly like one that will, in time, have a place alongside more traditional treatments like chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery.’

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Gene-Modifying Treatment Halts Cancer in Five Patients

Categories: leukaemia, Research, treatment

Can a Cancer Treatment Increase Your Risk of Leukaemia?

There’s no doubt that advancements in cancer treatment have improved the wellbeing of patients with certain cancers, but a study has found there’s still a risk of developing treatment-related leukaemia. Though chemotherapy is often a highly effective treatment for cancer, certain drugs it uses can negatively affect your wellness, and increase your risk of developing therapy-related acute myeloid leukemia (tAML), a rare but frequently fatal condition.

According to Lindsay Morton, PhD, of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and lead author of the study, ‘In the course of improving interventions and survival rates in many types of cancer, we have learned that certain chemotherapies can cause damage to cells in the bone marrow, increasing a patient’s risk of leukaemia. However, no recent large-scale studies have evaluated how the risk of treatment-related leukaemia has evolved with the changing treatment strategies.’

Hence, Morton and her team from the NCI’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics looked at data from cancer registries in the U.S. Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Programme. The researchers identified adult patients between the ages of 20 and 84 who were diagnosed with any type of cancer between 1975 and 2008, and were treated with chemotherapy. In 426,068 patients, 801cases of tAML were confirmed, which is nearly five times more than the number of cases expected in the general population.

The trends of tAML incidences were discovered to be consistent with changing treatment practices and the toxicities associated with certain chemotherapies. The researchers also noted that the proportion of patients receiving chemotherapy, whether with or without radiotherapy, increased during the study period for many malignancies. Yet the database analysis also found that relative tAML risk for many patients tended to decline with increasing time since the initial cancer diagnosis, especially for those with non-haematologic malignancies.

Dr Morton commented, ‘Future studies should identify patients at the highest risk of tAML so that the risks can be weighed against the benefits of chemotherapy, particularly for cancers with favourable long-term survival.’ She added, ‘Further research is also warranted to assess the risks associated with new targeted and immunomodulatory agents by including secondary malignancies such as tAML as endpoints in prospective clinical studies of new agents or new uses of standard agents.’

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Can a Cancer Treatment Increase Your Risk of Leukaemia?

Categories: cancer treatment, chemotheraphy, leukaemia