Leukaemia Biology

The goal of the Leukaemia Biology group is to develop understanding of disease mechanisms in myeloid lineage blood cancers and through doing so to identify candidate therapeutic targets for development through to the clinic.

Recent years have seen significant progress in the development of better therapies for people with blood cancer, with concomitant improvements in response. However, there remains a substantial unmet need for more effective and less toxic treatments.

Much of the focus of the group continues to be on understanding disease mechanisms in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). This is a blood cancer characterised by a block to normal myeloid lineage differentiation leading to accumulation of myeloid blast cells in bone marrow (BM), with failure of normal blood cell production. Despite much progress in recent years, including the FDA approval of several novel therapies, it remains the case that long term survival from AML remains poor, especially in those over the age of 60.   

The group works on understanding how transcription factors and their associated chromatin cofactors sustain myeloid blood cancers such as AML.  We recently reported our discovery of how a small molecule bromodomain inhibitor of the acetyltransferases EP300 and CBP induces cell cycle arrest and cellular differentiation in blood cancer, as well as our preliminary data from the early phase clinical trial evaluation of CCS1477, where we see promising signs of clinical activity across a range of haematological malignancies.