£100K for AML Research
LLNI Awards Dr Graeme Greenfield Grant
In our 60th Anniversary year we’re delighted to announce further funding of £100,000 for research into acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) and myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN).
This funding has been awarded to Dr Graeme Greenfield who is establishing a new project which aims to understand how individual leukaemia cells adapt to avoid cell death following treatment.
Dr Greenfield explains his project:
“My clinical and research interests are in myeloid blood cancers including myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN) and acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). In both cases there are critical unmet needs to develop new, tolerable and effective treatments which will improve patient outcomes.
With the core support provided generously by LLNI I will establish a new project here at Queen’s University Belfast which aims to understand how individual leukaemia cells adapt to avoid cell death following treatment. In the first stages of this project, I will employ new and groundbreaking long read single cell sequencing technologies to analyse patient samples from individuals with AML at diagnosis and following treatment. This will provide a huge amount of information about each individual leukaemic cell including the mutations it has, how it can interpret the genetic code and what parts of that genetic code are turned on and off. I will then aim to incorporate all this information together to determine what the core features of each leukaemia cell are and what vulnerabilities those cells possess. By comparing samples from diagnosis and following treatment I hope to understand more about how resistance to treatment develops in the patient.
I will then test targeted treatment of these cells in the laboratory, based on the information established, to help identify new treatments for AML patients. In addition to this, I will continue to lead research to establish new combination treatments for individuals with MPN which effectively reduce the disease burden and can help to change the course of the disease.”
We wish Graeme all the best with this project and look forward to sharing updates with you.
