EU funds Population Genetics in leukemia study consortium

The largest ever genomic study of relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common malignant disease of childhood, will fund UK-based Population Genetics Technologies to identify the genetic factors in resistance to treatment by carrying out a multi-year analysis of thousands of DNA samples from relapsed ALL cases.

The IntReALL consortium of 23 research teams, led by Vaskar Saha, Professor of Paediatric Oncology at The University of Manchester, UK, will gather DNA across Europe, Japan, Israel and Australia from children who have relapsed after treatment for ALL. With funding from IntReALL’s EU FP7 grant, Population Genetics, creator of innovative methods for population-scale genetic analyses and biomarker discovery, will study the resulting biobank using its GenomePooling workflows to identify and validate associations between genetic risk factors and treatment efficacy.

Goals are to understand which patients are suited for reduced toxicity treatments and also to provide a genetically stratified basis for randomised controlled studies of potential new treatment agents.