Molecular Alterations In Leukemia May Foster Better Treatments

Changes in a specific type of protein (IL-7R) may lead to the initiation of leukemia subtype — acute lymphoblastic leukemia as per a study at the Instituto De Medicina Molecular, published in the journal Nature Communications. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is a type of aggressive cancer that affects lymphocytes (type of immune cells). It is common in children.

“Using mouse models that we developed, we found that mutations in IL-7R that lead to the constant activation of this protein are sufficient to trigger the disease. The exact same mutations are found in human patients and so we believe that these changes in IL-7R can be at the origin of the disease also in people”, says João T. Barata, coordinator of the study.

The alterations in protein IL-7R may thereby help understand the molecular players involved in leukemia onset and help better development of targeted treatments.

Although chemotherapy is efficient in more than 80% of pediatric cases, the efficiency comes down to half among adults along with the emergence of secondary effects.

“It’s important to find new therapeutic strategies to improve the efficacy of the current treatments and to reduce the probability of secondary effects. The mice we generated develop leukemia with very similar characteristics to that found in humans. These mice can be used to identify and test new treatments, such as drugs that decrease the activation of IL-7R, including some that we discovered in this work”, says Afonso Almeida, first author of the study.

Source-Medindia