The Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital are ideally placed to conduct cutting edge research as the country’s only Biomedical Research Centre for paediatrics.
Amongst other things we are conducting research into how the immune system can be used to tackle neuroblastoma as well as some of the other aggressive childhood solid cancers. The immune system is made up of the blood cells that recognise invading viruses and bacteria as foreign and respond to the infection by killing off these invading bugs. Immunotherapy means manipulating the patient’s own immune system to recognise their tumour cells as foreign cells.
We are following two approaches to immunotherapy. First we are teaching a patient’s immune cells to recognise the patient’s own tumour by taking immune cells out of the body and exposing them to fragments of the patient’s tumour. These educated cells are then injected back into the patient and because they have now learnt what the tumour looks like, they can mount a much more effective attack against the remaining tumour cells.
Another approach we are researching involves changing the genes of the killer cells of the immune system by gene therapy. We aim to put in new genes which will redirect the function of the killer cells to kill tumour cells rather than invading viruses or bacteria. It is a very new and experimental approach but the initial laboratory results are promising.
Click here to download more information 'A vaccine for aggressive childhood brain tumours'
We also need to understand leukaemia at a much more fundamental level. For example, 80% of childhood leukaemia patients have a rearrangement in their chromosomes where part of one gene (the MLL gene) erroneously gets stuck next to part of another gene. This rearrangement results in blood cells receiving faulty instructions. Our research is two-fold – we are trying to understand what the normal function of the MLL gene is (the correct instructions) and how the instructions are corrupted by the rearrangement. If we can understand both of these things we will be able to explore novel ways of issuing new instructions to correct the corrupted message.
Click here to download more information 'Switching off the gene that causes childhood leukaemia'
The initial results of our research are very promising but we need to do more to turn these findings into the treatments of the future.
