Grant: Project Grant

T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or "T-ALL", is a type of blood cancer that affects children and adults worldwide, with approximately 30 new cases per million children and 10 new cases per million adults diagnosed each year. Within Canada, this adds up to about 80 new cancer patients per year in total. While current treatments cure about 80% of children, only about 40% of adults are as fortunate. Even for those who are cured, the chemotherapy they have to go through makes them very sick and can cause other, long-term health problems. Dr. Weng's team has recently shown that a group of molecules collectively referred to as the "Wnt signaling pathway" are important for cancer stem cells, which are thought to be responsible for disease relapse even after successful chemotherapy. In this study, Drs. Weng and Giambra now propose to explore precisely how the Wnt signaling pathway helps cancer stem cells in T-ALL to evade chemotherapy and drive disease relapse. While the immediate goals of this research are to cure T-ALL, we predict that the Wnt signaling pathway will activate common cellular pathways that control cancer stem cells more generally, and thus these studies may provide leads towards identifying cures for other cancers as well.