 |  |  | | | Birmingham gets £120,000 for leukaemia research | | | | |
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Release Date: 9th April 2003
Blood cells stuck at an immature stage of development are the subject of the latest Leukaemia Research grant to top Birmingham scientists.
Healthy blood cells go through a gradual process of maturation and when the time is right and their job is done they self destruct; indeed most white blood cells survive in circulation for only a few days.
But some cells pick up damage that means they don't grow up and fail to get the signal to kill themselves.
Changes like this in two types of white blood cells — neutrophils and monocytes, which form part of the immune system — can lead to acute myeloid leukaemia as massive numbers of unwanted cells accumulate in the bone marrow and spill out into the blood stream.
Now Dr Philip Hughes and Dr Geoffrey Brown, University of Birmingham Medical School, are developing new ways to encourage cancer cells to grow up — so that they eventually commit suicide just like normal cells.
One of the most effective treatments for AML involves chemotherapy to kill the cancer cells combined with high doses of drugs that encourage the maturing process.
Recently the team has found that naturally occurring substances called flavonoids, found in soya beans and some green vegetables, increase the sensitivity of leukaemia cells in the laboratory to substances that will make them mature. They also found that these substances in high enough doses will actually kill the leukaemia cells.
The team will use the new grant to determine how the flavonoids work. "By understanding more about the process of cell death and how it can be controlled we can look to develop better drugs to control the process. This will lead to improvements in treatment for people with acute leukaemia," explained Dr Hughes.
Dr David Grant, Scientific Director, said: "We are confident that this research will go far in saving lives. This type of work is just one of the ways in which we are learning to defeat leukaemia. Other LRF research teams around the country are embarked on similar pioneering studies bringing us closer to our goals."
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