Resistance to therapy is one of the most important challenges for patients living with acute leukemia. Despite initially responding to chemotherapy and achieving complete remission, the disease will eventually come back and kill most patients within five years after the initial diagnosis.

For patients who remain in complete remission, prolonged exposure to chemotherapy causes long-term, detrimental side-effects. In addition to these adverse physical effects, acute leukemia and prolonged treatments both cause significant social and financial constraints that are disproportionally impacting younger and socioeconomically disadvantaged patients.

Current treatments destroy more than 99 per cent of the tumor, but a few leukemia cells survive and can regenerate the disease.

We will investigate how tumour cells survive chemotherapy, thereby improving our understanding of acute leukemia. This proposal will use innovative approaches that enable us to track tumor cells in different tissues. This will help us identify the weakness of chemotherapy-resistant cells that could be targeted with novel therapies.

Ultimately, this could not only improve response to treatment but also reduce the length of toxic chemotherapy needed for achieving and maintaining complete remission in children and adolescents with acute leukemia.