Projects we fund

Overview

Very little is known about how childhood leukaemia develops. Cancerous leukaemia cells form when something goes wrong in the production of new blood cells. Prof. Katrin Ottersbach at the University of Edinburgh is investigating whether overactivity of the immune system, such as in response to an infection, could induce the development of childhood leukaemia, as it does with adult leukaemia. She has been studying whether certain infections during a baby’s development could trigger the development of a type of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). Understanding the origins of leukaemia will help the team to develop better ways of preventing and treating it. Prof. Ottersbach is also studying how a chromosomal rearrangement that fuses the two genes – MLL and AF4 – before birth leads to a particularly aggressive manifestation of the disease called B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (B-ALL). To do this, her team is looking at cells in the lab, as well as young mice with the disease, to gain new insights into how MLL and AF4 causes infant leukaemia.

Potential impact

The outlook for children diagnosed with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (B-ALL) is poor because there is a lack of knowledge about how the disease occurs in children. In this project, Prof. Katrin Ottersbach’s ultimate goal is to apply their findings to develop new and more precise therapies to give children a better chance of survival from this aggressive form of cancer.