Targeting a More Serious Form of Leukemia
Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have found that the unique conditions that exist inside a person’s body may play a significant role in whether that person will develop one type of leukemia over another.
The findings, published in a recent issue of Cancer Cell, focused on a particularly deadly form of leukemia caused by a gene mutation called a “mixed lineage leukemia (MLL) translocation.”
MLL translocations don’t always lead to the same type of leukemia: they cause about seven percent of all acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL) cases, and about nine percent of all acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cases.
In the past, researchers suspected that the type of leukemia that developed from MLL translocations just depended on where in the chromosome the translocation re-attached. “But in this paper, we use the translocation partner that usually causes myeloid leukemia in people, yet we can get exclusively lymphoid [leukemia] or exclusively myeloid leukemia, depending on what environment we expose the cells to,” said James Mulloy, PhD, associate professor of Pediatrics in Experimental Hematology at Cincinnati Children’s.
Dr. Mulloy thinks that timing, and where the cell is in the normal cycle of blood cell formation, may play a larger role in MLL-related leukemia than previously thought.
“Now we will be able to come to an understanding of how important the maturation of the cell is during the formation of MLL-related leukemia,” says Dr. Mulloy, “and if that’s playing a major role, it could impact therapy.” Targeting cells at crucial stages during leukemia cell maturation, he says, could help make chemotherapy more successful and less toxic.
