FOCUS ON: THE BLOOM APPEAL

The Bloom Appeal makes a difference for blood cancer patients in Merseyside and surrounding areas through supporting the care and wellbeing of patients with blood cancer and funding scientific research into treatment and cure of all types of leukemia, lymphomas and other blood cancers.

Together we have funded a new project from Professor Joseph Slupsky and his team at University of Liverpool. They describe the project:

• Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) and diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL) make up more than half of all the newly diagnosed cases of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), the sixth most common cancer in the UK.
• Some cases of these diseases have a deletion in one of the chromosomes, which means these cells lose about 394 genes. Patients who have this deletion have a higher risk disease as not only is their disease more aggressive, but it can also become more resistant to therapy.
• Unfortunately, we know very little about how these genes work together, as there are no models we can use to study how their loss affects the way that the cells work.
• In this project, we will use a technique called CRISPR/Cas9 (known as molecular scissors) to remove these genes from cells that have been developed from patients with CLL and DLBCL. This will allow us to study them in the laboratory to see how the cells develop resistance to therapy, and potentially uncover new ways to treat these diseases by understanding how the genes work together.