Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer

Background

T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) is a white blood cell cancer in which tumor cells originating from the bone marrow spread using the bloodstream and invade peripheral organs. Advancement in treatment today allow 80-90% of the patients to recover. However, a significant percentage of them experience relapses. Relapses after successful remission were suggested to occur due to leukemic stem cells that survive the primary therapy and re-establish a harder to treat tumor.

T Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (T-ALL) is an aggressive leukemia with increased incidence in children, adolescents and young adults. Currently, the standard treatment of T-ALL patients is intensive chemotherapy with almost 70%, 5-year event free survival for pediatric patients. Moreover, such non-targeted therapies fail to address high-risk T-ALL subtypes, with less than 40% of the patients becoming long-term survivors in the case of one such subtype, the ETP T-ALL (a more immature, stem cell-like flavor of the disease).

T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia is a common pediatric tumor caused by the transformation of T cells of the immune system. Although treatment outcome in T-ALL has improved in recent years, patients with relapsed disease continue to have dismal prognosis despite the use of protocols involving hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. One of the most devastating manifestations of the disease is the leukemia relapse in the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord). It is thus very important to identify and study the genes that control both induction and establishment of the disease.