Tackling high-risk leukemia

The innovative "ExTrAct AML" project, funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, goes beyond established frontiers to investigate acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in children and adolescents. Individual patient profiles should provide early information on the causes of disease progression or treatment resistance - and how to take countermeasures in time. In contrast to previous approaches, these profiles not only include comprehensive (epi)genetic signatures of the leukemia cells, but also their dysfunctional signaling pathways and sensitivity to more than 100 drugs - determined by a new and particularly precise method, that examines the effect of the drugs on cancer cells (pharmacoscopy). The highly endowed FWF grant goes to St. Anna Children's Cancer Research Institute (St. Anna CCRI) and its project partner, the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. AML is one of the most serious malignancies in children and adolescents. Despite intensive therapy, this type of leukemia still has a fatal course in about 25% of the patients and the reasons for disease relapses and treatment resistance are so far only partially understood. This is now set to change, thanks to a grant in the amount of € 585,000 from the FWF Clinical Research Program for the project ExTrAct-AML.