Our ground-breaking leukaemia research at the Kolling Institute has received an important boost with the Cancer Council NSW announcing a $450,000 grant for Associate Professor Jenny Wang and her research team.
The funds will help the development of a new therapy to greatly improve survival rates for those with acute myeloid leukaemia.
This form of blood cancer is particularly aggressive, with less than a third of patients surviving five years after diagnosis.
In many cases, the leukaemia does not respond well to chemotherapy and often returns.
A/Professor Wang welcomed the significant funding saying it will strengthen her research targeting the protective mechanism within the leukaemia stem cells which makes them resistant to chemotherapy.
“My team has discovered a self-renewal pathway which enables leukaemia stem cells to protect themselves from chemotherapy and reproduce,” she said.
“There are currently no effective treatments to target these leukaemia-initiating cells but my team is developing a therapy to eliminate them and improve patient outcomes.
“Encouragingly, we anticipate this approach could help other cancers driven by tumour-initiating cells, such as cancers of the lung, breast, prostate, colon and brain.
“These cancers may share the same survival mechanism as the leukaemia stem cells so the approach may also effectively target them.”