More than 50,000 children, adolescents, and young adults under age 20 in the U.S. are living with or in remission from leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma, and other related syndromes, according to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. That number is greater than all undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Washington.
About 10,000 of those children’s cancers are myeloid in origin. They represent a spectrum of blood or plasma-related malignancies; most are acute. Many of the parents and caregivers of these children find hope in the five-year survival rates of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. Statistics from the National Cancer Institute indicate the rates are 68% for children younger than 15 and 57% for adolescents ages 15 to 19.
But for BBI’s Dr. Scott Furlan those percentages represent “unacceptably high mortality rates.”
Furlan is a physician-scientist who serves as an Assistant Professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and in the Department of Pediatrics at the UW. He is the Lead Principal Investigator of a $150,000 BBI grant, awarded in January of this year, measure residual disease and to predict more accurately the cancer’s relapse. Others participating in the grant are Todd Cooper, a Pediatric Hematologist at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and Clinical Researchers Soheil Meshinchi and Sami Kanaan at the Fred Hutch.
“Our team of researchers believes that leukemic ‘stem’ cells are a critical component of pediatric AML,” Furlan said. “We’re seeking to rigorously quantify these leukemia initiating cells in patients with residual disease by using leading edge, single-cell analysis. Moreover, we’re hoping our experiments will form the foundation for an entirely novel approach to measuring residual cancer cells that, in turn, will more accurately predict relapse than current conventional approaches.”Scott Furlan
