So far the discovery hasn’t had a direct impact on the development of the treatment of the most common type of leukemia affecting the adult population in Europe, but it is an important step in finding out how the disease behaves and develops, which is the precondition for discovering an effective treatment. Scientists working at LF MU and CEITEC MU published the results of their research in the prestigious journal, Blood, published by the American Society of Hematology.
“We have been working on the research of new methods of diagnostics and therapy for chronic lymphocytic leukemia long-term. Our aim is to find out in detail how the disease originates, how a healthy cell becomes a tumorous one and how the behaviour of the disease changes over the course of time. Then, we will be able to say when and how it is best to intervene with treatment.” explained Michael Doubek of the Department of Internal Medicine, Hematology and Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, MU.
Chronic lymphocytic leukemia is the most frequent leukemia in white men. Each year approximately six people in one hundred thousand are affected. There are over five hundred people living with this disease just in the South Moravian region alone. It is typical for this disease, which reveals itself in the reduction of healthy white blood cells, weight loss or enlarged glands, that in many people it does not cause any major problems as it emerges – these patients do not have any significant complaints. This creates problems for doctors in deciding who to treat, and when and how to treat them.
“It is possible that the disease may become dormant for some time and the patient’s symptoms may subside, but after some time the disease resumes in a more aggressive form. In order to avoid these unsuitable interventions one hundred per cent, it is crucial for us to identify the disease’s mechanisms thoroughly” says Doubek.
The team of scientists working under the leadership of Šárka Pospíšilová at the Centre of Molecular Biology and Gene Therapy, Department of Internal Medicine, Hematology and Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, MU and more recently in the Centre of Molecular Medicine, CEITEC MU, has been working on the examination of genetic changes in tumourous cells of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia for many years.
During the research the scientists noticed that there is a specific section of DNA where chromosome 22 is missing in leukemia cells in some of the affected people. They focused on a detailed analysis of this missing section and found that there are not only genes for the origin of immunoglobulins located in it, but also a gene for the regulatory molecule microRNA-650. They began to study its role and after three years they found that the occurrence of the gene for microRNA is closely related to the further prognosis of the disease. In the patients, whose level of microRNA-650 is higher in cells, the prognosis is better than in those, whose level of this microRNA-650 is low. Almost twenty scientists have been working on the research project, among which were a number of doctoral students from Masaryk University.
