Scientists have created a roadmap of the genetic mutations present in the most common childhood cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). The St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital study is the first to supply a comprehensive view of the genomics of all subtypes of ALL. The work serves as a foundational guide for physicians and scientists to understand disease development and improve treatment outcomes. The research was published today in Nature Genetics.
“In this study, we were able to comprehensively define the number and type of recurrently altered genes that are found in childhood ALL,” said co-corresponding author Charles Mullighan, Ph.D., M.B.B.S., St. Jude Department of Pathology. “Because of the scale of the study, we could identify many newly implicated genes that have not been reported in leukemia or cancer at all, and to show that they fall into several new cellular pathways.”
Creating A Roadmap to Understand ALL
Due to the work of scientists and clinicians at institutions such as St. Jude, most children with ALL will survive. However, a fraction of those patients do not respond well to therapy. Scientists believed that differences in these patients’ cancer genetics could predict treatment responses. For example, the St. Jude team found that in leukemia that is normally considered low risk, a single specific genetic rearrangement was associated with a significantly increased risk of relapse.
If researchers understand the impact of genetic differences on cancer outcomes, then in the future physicians can sequence patients’ cancer before starting treatment. This will enable physicians to personalize treatments to individual patients based on their genetics and likelihood of responding to different anti-cancer therapies.
But before bringing personalized therapies into the clinic, scientists need to map the different mutations that drive the development of leukemia across the landscape of diverse disease subtypes.
Source: Read Full Article