Advanced Diagnostics and Target Discovery in Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL)

Research Activity

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common cancer diagnosed in children. It has an overall survival of approximately 80%, with certain subsets experiencing greater than 98% cure rate. Incremental advances in therapy have led to marked improvements in survival since it was first treated, with these advances highlighting the importance of clinical trials through cooperative multicenter groups. Childhood ALL also serves as the paradigm for risk-based therapy. By identifying the features that have been shown to affect prognosis, patients can be classified into groups based on risk of treatment failure. Those with favorable features can be treated with less toxic regimens, whereas more aggressive regimens are reserved for those with more high-risk disease. It is therefore paramount to identify those features shown to consistently affect prognosis and, thus, influence treatment. Thus, our research aims at the identification of new genetic aberrations and mutations with prognostic value to be used as biomarkers to improve diagnosis and risk stratification of patients and their treatment response by employing tailored adapted therapies. To this goal, different advanced diagnostics and research initiatives are conducted in our group:

• Advanced Flow Cytometry Application in Childhood Acute Leukemia
Prof. Barbara Buldini – Principal Investigator

• Transcriptomics and Functional Genomics in JMML and B ALL
Dr. Silvia Bresolin – Principal Investigator

• Phosphoproteomics for ALL diagnostics and research
Dr. Valentina Serafin – Junior Principal Investigator