In 2025 LMRUK awarded Dr Zhuoyao Chen an Early Career Research grant. The research, entitled ‘Establishing the pharmacological mechanism of cord blood stem cell expansion agonists’, aims to help address a limitation in transplantation therapies, which are widely used to treat blood cancer. Today on World Cancer Research Day Dr Chen shares an update on her research.
For blood cancer patients, cord blood is an important source of stem cells for transplantation therapies. It is particularly required by patients who cannot find an HLA-matched donor. However, each cord blood unit contains only a small number of stem cells. Too few stem cells can lead to slower recovery, longer hospital stays, and, in some cases, transplant failure. Funded by LMRUK, our research aims to overcome this limitation by identifying a drug that can safely and effectively increase the number of cord blood stem cells outside the patient’s body before transplantation. If successful, this approach could make better use of the valuable cells already stored in cord blood banks and help more patients receive cord blood transplantation treatment.
To date, we have developed a series of new drugs and compared them with an existing drug to see how well they can increase the number of stem cells from cord blood. Our work has identified several promising new drugs that can promote better stem cell growth at lower doses and with reduced toxicity. These findings are encouraging and show that there is clear potential to improve on current approaches to expanding cord blood stem cells.
We are also studying what makes these new drugs work better. By measuring various molecular properties of these drugs and linking the key features to their effectiveness, we are learning more about how they promote stem cell growth. This knowledge is helping us to understand what makes a successful drug and will guide the design of even better drugs in the future. It also provides valuable insights into the biology of blood stem cells and how their growth can be controlled.
The next stage of our research will further develop the most promising drugs and test whether the drug-expanded human stem cells can establish themselves into successful transplants and re-create immune systems in animal models. Through this work, we hope to accelerate further research and help move this approach closer to benefiting blood cancer patients.
