Major EU funding set to make leukemia therapies safer

Freiburg medical professional Robert Zeiser receives an ERC Advanced Grant A stem cell donation is a promising therapy for many leukemia patients. But the therapy has risks: It is not uncommon for leukemia to return, and in about half of those treated, the transferred immune cells attack the recipient's tissue. Such acute graft-versus-host disease, or aGvHD, is just as life-threatening as a possible leukemia relapse. With an ERC Advanced Grant of 2.5 million euros, the European Research Council is funding Robert Zeiser from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Freiburg, who, together with his team, is researching new starting points to improve the healing of patients after stem cell transplantation. "We were able to show that an acute rejection reaction often starts in the intestine because it loses its barrier function," says Zeiser, head of the Division of Tumor Immunology at the Department of Internal Medicine I at the Medical Center - University of Freiburg. "In further studies, we have shown that blood cancer cells can manipulate immune cells with the help of lactic acid and even switch them off. We want to find out exactly how these two processes take place.