Leukemia's "weak spot" may be the answer to more effective therapy

Acute lymphocytic leukemia is a disease that mostly affects children and adolescents. i3S researcher Nuno Rodrigues dos Santos recently discovered a “weak spot” of sorts in the disease, which could make way for new and more effective therapeutics.

The work is being carried out in cooperation with French research teams and may lay the groundwork for new treatments whenever the disease doesn’t respond to chemotherapy. The discoveries have already been published in the journal International Cancer Discovery.

A highly fatal illness, acute lymphocytic leukemia also affects adults, who do not respond well to chemotherapy-based treatments, endure relapses and eventually succumb to the disease. When the patient suffering from this kind of leukemia does not present improvements with chemo and other conventional treatments, “this new therapy, which resorts to monoclonal antibodies, may be a more effective complement”, the researcher explains.

Nuno Rodrigues dos Santos joined i3S in March 2016 as a principal investigator. The experiments leading to the article now published were developed at Centro de Investigação em Biomedicina – University of Algarve.


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