Funded by The Little Princess Trust and administered by CCLG
Lead investigator: Dr Karen Keeshan, University of Glasgow
Award: £117,675.00
Awarded February 2024
Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML)is a type of blood cancer that causes most of the leukaemia-related deaths in children. It is treated with very harsh chemotherapy that leaves children with side effects they have to deal with for the rest of their lives. Despite this harsh treatment, the disease still comes back in 30-40% of children.
Studies have shown that leukaemia stem cells (LSCs) are the cells that initiate the cancer. They don’t disappear following treatment, and make the leukaemia come back. LSCs are different to both healthy cells and other cancer cells. They have specific proteins on their surfaces, and inside them, that make them both different and more dangerous. It is important to know what proteins LSCs have on their surfaces because researchers could develop treatments to specifically attack cells with those proteins. If those proteins (or ‘tags’) are only present on cancer cells, then these treatments would be safer because they would not attack healthy cells. It would be a more effective treatment approach because it would be attacking the root of the cancer – the LSCs.
Dr Karen Keeshan works in a research team at the University of Glasgow, which has found a new tag on LSCs taken from children with AML. It is a protein called CD180. In this project, she wants to find out more about this tag, and whether it could be used to kill AML cells.
She will be looking at data from nearly 600 children with AML who were enrolled on the Myechild 01 clinical trial. With cancer samples they collected, the trial looked at all of the molecules present in the cancer cells and created transcriptome analyses. These analyses show which genes are made into proteins and how they are regulated.
Dr Keeshan will use these analyses to see whether the CD180 tag is present for all children with AML, or just some groups of patients. She will also be looking at whether the CD180 tag is linked to how the cancer behaves, to see whether it could be used to predict how bad a child’s cancer is likely to be. Lastly, the research team will look at whether healthy cells also carry the tag. This will show how good this CD180 tag could be for monitoring the numbers of LSCs, and how useful it would be as a target for new treatments.
The researchers will collate this into a toolkit for doctors, which Dr Keeshan hopes can be used to measure the number of cells with the CD180 tag and therefore to track the progression of AML.