Leukemia

Leukemia is one of the most important subtypes of childhood cancer. Overall survival rates for children that suffered from leukemia improved tremendously over the past decades from 10% in 1960 to more than 80% in current treatment regimens. Surprisingly, this incredible improvement in treatment outcome has not been accomplished by the introduction of novel drugs, but was rather achieved by optimizing the order and intensity of the same set of chemotherapeutic agents that was already used dunring the 60’s. Unfortunately, these intensive chemotherapeutic treatment regimens are extremely toxic for children and cause important acute and long term side effects.

Our lab aims to study the molecular pathogenesis of childhood leukemia as a prerequisite for the development of more effective and less toxic targeted therapies. For this, we use high throughput genomic technologies and in vivo mouse models including patient derived xenografts to identify genes and signalling pathways that are implicated in the initiation and maintenance of different subtypes of human leukemia. In addition, we study how leukemic subpopulations that survive chemotherapy regimens will eventually give rise to hematological relapse and use these novel molecular insights to develop novel therapeutic strategies that can eradicate these chemo resistant tumor cells.

Research topics: Leukemia

• The role of RUNX2 in T-cell ALL
• MYC translocations in T-cell ALL
• Novel targeted therapies in T-cell ALL
• The role of Lin28b in JMML
• The role of CD200/BTLA deletions in pre-B-ALL