Some leukemias evade treatment by changing their appearance and identity through changing the read-out of their DNA, a new study has found. Prof. dr. Olaf Heidenreich, research group leader at the Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology and co-lead of the study: “Our new research will help us in the future to pick out those children with leukemia who are at greatest risk of their cancer coming back, so we can adjust and personalize their treatment.”
About 110 children in the Netherlands are diagnosed with blood cancer B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) each year. There have been huge improvements in treatment over the last 50 years and nine in every ten children diagnosed will now be cured. For those whose leukemia does not respond to treatment, much hope has been placed on new immunotherapies, like antibody and immune cell-based treatments, such as CAR T-cells.
However, doctors have seen that some leukemias can evade immune therapies by stopping the production of the cell surface proteins which these therapies target, or even by switching to become a different type of blood cancer against which these new treatments don’t work. Children whose leukemia has a change in the MLL gene especially are at a higher risk of their cancer coming back after treatment.
