Project Term
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Project Summary
Outcomes for children with T-ALL and T-LL have improved, yet prognosis for children with relapsed disease is dismal. A critical gap remains in identifying high-risk patients in order to allocate novel targeted therapies or immunotherapies. Building on prior work, I will utilize comprehensive genomic profiling to examine the impact of genetic ancestry on tumor biology and survival outcomes. My goal is to improve risk stratification, guide targeted therapy, and reduce inequity in T-ALL/T-LL.
Lay Abstract
Leukemia and lymphoma are common cancers in children. This project is focused on leukemia and lymphoma that comes from a type of blood cell called T-cells. Abnormal T-cells can lead to diseases called T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) and T-cell acute lymphoblastic lymphoma (T-LL).
Over the years, cure rates have improved a lot for children with T-ALL and T-LL. Unfortunately, if these children relapse, we do not have many good treatment options. We hope to find better ways to cure relapsed T-ALL and T-LL. One way to do this is by better understanding the blueprint of the cancer cells. The genetic blueprint is a map of the changes that went wrong in the cancer cell and caused it to grow out of control. Our research group has just discovered more information about the genetic blueprints in T-ALL and T-LL. We now know that these diseases can be broken into different groups. Some of these groups need more treatment to be cured. Other groups need less treatment to be cured.
In many childhood cancers, Black and Hispanic patients are more likely to relapse and die than White patients. Some of this is due to what we call social determinants of health. These are things like not having a car to get to the hospital or enough money to buy medications. Some of the differences in cure may also be due to differences in a person's genetic blueprint because of where their ancestors came from. We call this a person's genetic ancestry.
I studied a group of over 1000 patients with T-ALL and found that the blueprint of their leukemia was different based on ancestry. To better understand these findings, I need to compare this to another large group of patients with T-ALL, and a group of patients with T-LL. I will compare how the blueprints differ in T-ALL and T-LL to learn more about the diseases. Information from this study will help us find children whose cancer needs different treatment, right from the time of diagnosis. This may also tell us about opportunities for special drugs for certain patients. We hope this study will help prevent more children with T-ALL and T-LL from relapsing and especially help children of all different ancestral backgrounds.
Program
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