LEUKAEMIA & Myeloma Research UK (LMRUK) has awarded two grants worth a total of £63,000 to advance new research in the field of blood cancer.
The blood cancer research charity offers an annual grant to researchers looking to improve knowledge and understanding of the cause, diagnosis, and treatments for this form of cancer.
The grants have been awarded to Dr Sophie Kellaway, an Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham, and Professor Cristina Lo Celso and Dr Germaine Chia of Imperial College London.
Dr Kellaway has been awarded the Early Careers Grant to support her work entitled ‘Investigating DNA damage accumulation in Leukaemia stem cells’. She has embarked on the 18-month project with the support of a research student.
She said:
“What I’m interested in is why some patients go on to relapse and how we can stop this from happening. Some patients who contract Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) sadly die quite quickly but others respond well to chemotherapy but then relapse. This is especially difficult as treatment the second time around is often less successful.”
Her laboratory-based research centres on the re-growth of cells that cause the cancer and whether they can be neutralised with the use of two drugs already available to treat other conditions which, she believes, may help prevent the return of certain types of blood cancers.
The funding awarded to Professor Lo Celso and Dr Chia will support their two-year project that aims to improve the efficiency of treatment for blood cancers and reduce its toxicity. The project is entitled ‘Regaining Control and Restoring Balance: Understanding bone marrow microenvironment remodelling in Acute Myeloid Leukaemia to aid hematopoietic recovery after chemotherapy’.
Professor Cristina Lo Celso and Dr Germaine Chia.Using the most modern techniques, including spatial transcriptomics and advanced microscopic analysis, the research aims to find out what causes some patients with AML to be affected by incomplete blood count recovery after treatment, which studies have shown is associated with poorer survival and even Leukaemia relapse.
The team believe that the bone marrow microenvironment plays a key role in blood count recovery after chemotherapy by supporting blood stem cells and will use the charity’s funding to further investigate this hypothesis.
Dr Joanna Tilley, Operations Director at LMRUK said:
“We’re passionate about supporting new research into blood cancer to better understand this disease and how we can fight it to help protect the next generation.
“We’re pleased to have awarded two significant grants to support both these fascinating projects, and we look forward to seeing how their work progresses.”
For more information on the two research projects, visit LMRUK’s website: lmruk.org/news/.
To learn more about LMRUK and its annual research grant scheme, please visit: https://lmruk.org/research.
