Finding new ways to identify treatment induced drug resistance in childhood leukaemia patients

Acute Leukaemia is the most common form of childhood cancer, responsible for 31% of childhood cancer cases in the UK. The treatment of leukaemia often involves multiple drug treatments, which are often needed as a patients leukaemia cells can develop resistance to the drug being given.

Treatment with more than one drug has dramatically increased childhood cancer survival rates to over 80% today, however, these treatments cause tremendous damage to healthy cells within the child’s body. This damage can leave childhood cancer survivors with a series of late-effects such as hearing loss, organ and bone problems and even infertility. In fact two thirds of childhood cancer survivors will suffer some form of late-effects of treatment, and the more therapies necessary during the course of treatment the more severe the late effects can become.

At the University of Salford, researchers believe that being able to monitor how patients are responding to therapies during treatment is key to being able to make better treatment decisions, so reducing the need for multiple drug treatments. However current ways of detecting drug resistance to treatments can be expensive, therefore they cannot be used as frequently as needed and the patients treatment success suffers as a result.

This project aims to develop new ways of detecting drug resistant cancer cells in the body by identifying proteins that are released during treatment, using very sensitive electrochemical sensors that can identify these proteins, quickly and cheaply.