Acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) is the most common cancer in childhood. While the treatment for ALL has greatly improved 15% of children and 50% of adults do not respond to current treatments. We are particularly interested in a type of leukemia that arises in an immune cell called a T-cell (T-ALL). Patients diagnosed with T-ALL present with cancer cells in the blood and the bone marrow; a large percentage of patients also present with disease in the spleen, liver, central nervous system and in the lymph nodes. It is not clear at present how these different environments affect the survival signaling of the cancer cells and we aim to assess this using a technology, called BH3 profiling. This technology measures how close the cancer cells are to death and if they are dependent on a particular anti-death BCL-2 protein for survival.Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to understand how the different environments, in which the cancer cells are found, alter the BCL-2 family of proteins. Altering the expression of an anti-death protein could provide a protective niche for the cancer cells to survive the treatment.
