2025
Advancing research into umbilical cord blood stem cells
The Charity awarded an Early Career’s Grant to a research project investigating stem cell expansion at the University Oxford, led by Senior Scientist Dr Zhuoyao Chen.
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.
Successful transplantation therapy requires a source of stem cells that can be used to regenerate the immune system of the patient. One such source is umbilical cord blood, which has several advantages, including that it can tolerate Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) mismatches – meaning there is a wider range of potential donors.
However, umbilical cord blood contains fewer stem cells than other sources. As a result, when a perfect donor is found for a patient, there are often not enough stem cells to proceed with transplantation therapy.
To address this, stem cells would need to be expanded outside of the patient’s body, and it was this that inspired Chen to begin her research. Her work will involve testing the impact of existing drugs on stem cell expansion, with the hope that findings from the project can be used to inform a decision on whether to invest more into formally developing a drug for stem cell expansion.
Chen’s application for the grant drew particular interest from our Research Review Committee because of its focus on the potential of umbilical cord blood and stem cell therapies – areas that strongly align with our mission. The Committee suggested that this project may have translational impact on use of cells stored within Public and Private Cord Blood Banks.
This connection was especially relevant because of our cord blood banking service, the Model Cell Biobank, which offers funding support to families who might otherwise be unable to access cord blood banking.
2024
Improving the efficiency of treatment for blood cancers
We awarded a £40,000 grant to support research examining why some patients treated with chemotherapy for blood cancers continue to suffer very low blood counts, even after the disease has been successfully treated.
The grant was awarded to Professor Cristina Lo Celso and her PhD student Dr Germaine Chia of Imperial College London, for a two-year project that aims to improve the efficiency of treatment for blood cancers and reduce its toxicity.
The project is entitled “Regaining control and restoring balance: Understanding bone marrow microenvironment remodelling in Acute Myeloid Leukaemia to aid hematopoietic recovery after chemotherapy.”
Using the most modern techniques, including spatial transcriptomics and advanced microscopic analysis, the research aims to find out what causes some patients with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia to be affected by incomplete blood count recovery after treatment, which studies have shown is associated with poorer survival and even leukaemia relapse.
The team believe that the bone marrow microenvironment plays a key role in blood count recovery after chemotherapy by supporting blood stem cells.
The impact of having low blood counts can be devastating for patients, increasing the risk of infection, affecting the ability of the blood to move oxygen around the body and impacting on clotting to stop bleeding.
Advancing new research into preventing blood cancer patients from relapsing
Assistant Professor Sophie Kellaway at the University of Nottingham was awarded £23,000 for an Early Careers Grant to support her work entitled ‘Investigating DNA damage accumulation in Leukaemia stem cells’. She has embarked on the 18-month project with the support of a research student at Nottingham.
She said: “What I am interested in is why some patients go on to relapse and how we can stop this from happening. Some patients who contract AML sadly die quite quickly but others respond well to chemotherapy but then relapse. This is especially difficult as treatment the second time around is often less successful.”
The emotional toll on patients who believe they have beaten the disease only to see it return months or sometimes years later can be severe and understanding the triggers for the disease to come back could lead to better outcomes, she explained.
Her laboratory-based research centres on the re-growth of cells that cause the cancer and whether they can be neutralised with the use of two drugs already available to treat other conditions and which, she believes, may help prevent the return of certain types of blood cancers.
Avastin is used to treat colorectal cancer and Fasenra is used in the control of asthma, but both could play a part in preventing patients who have recovered from blood cancer relapsing. Before any clinical trials can take place, however, Sophie must ensure there are no negative impacts from using these drugs as the pathways they block in the blood cancer cells are complex.
She hopes to produce enough evidence to take to drug companies to carry out further research if the potential benefits for blood cancer patients can be demonstrated.
2023
In 2023 grants worth a total of £57,500 were awarded for two projects that aim to help in the fight against blood cancers.
A £35,000 grant was awarded to Dr Neil Rodrigues, the principal investigator, and Professor Alex Tonks, co-investigator, at the European Cancer Stem Cell Research Institute at Cardiff University.
The money will help Dr Rodrigues continue his and Professor Tonks’ ground-breaking work into finding a more effective treatment for Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) – a cancer of white blood cells that grow in the bone marrow. In the UK, approximately 2,000 people a year are diagnosed with the condition which, overall, has a poor prognosis.
Dr Rodrigues said he was “honoured” to be the recipient of the award made directly by LMRUK for his work on AML in support of the research project titled: “Understanding ZEB1 mediated regulation of human Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) to leverage novel therapeutics in poor prognosis AML.”
He said the project, which was initiated in 2016, showed a gene called ZEB1 was a ‘master switch’ capable of activating ‘flags’ on leukaemia cells. Those ‘flags’ are potential new therapeutic targets in AML.
Dr Rodrigues said: “We’ve identified one ‘flag’ that we are aiming at taking down, but we want to identify a wide range of different ‘flags’, focussing on subtypes of AML with the poorest prognosis.
“We know ZEB1 is also a useful tool to distinguish between relatively more and less aggressive forms of AML alike.” He said this will help “deconstruct the biological and clinical complexity observed in this disease.”
Dr Rodrigues said AML could be likened to weeds; since current treatments for AML don’t remove the ‘roots’ of the disease, the disease often returns, like weeds do when the roots have not been eradicated. Dr Rodrigues continued: “The aim of this research project is to find new therapeutics that will take aim at the ‘roots’ of AML which underpin therapy resistance and relapse.
“This is an important area of research for patients afflicted by AML where treatment strategies and prognosis have not advanced significantly for many decades. It is very difficult to speak to families who donate to our research about why AML prognosis has remained poor despite a tremendous research effort worldwide, but it is important to do so to explain the challenges in treating this disease and the hopes we have for the work we are doing.”
The Charity also awarded a research grant of £22,500 to Dr Concetta Bubici, senior lecturer in the College of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences at the Brunel University of London, to continue her work investigating treatment for Myeloma by starving the disease of nutrients, specifically sugar and fat.
The Lister Wilder Research Grant awarded to Dr Bubici comes from money raised by Lister Wilder, a horticultural, agricultural and forestry machinery dealership with branches across the south of England. The money was raised by the company after one of their colleagues was diagnosed with blood cancer.
Dr Bubici, who received the Lister Wilder Research Grant, said she was investigating why treatments for Myeloma – which was treatable, but not curable – sometimes stopped working and why the various treatments sometimes failed to differentiate between malignant and healthy cells.
In her application for the research grant, she said: “What we know so far is that Myeloma cells are dependent on nutrients, such as sugar and fat. As a result, we propose to test whether starving Myeloma cells of nutrients could be used to treat Myeloma. This could quickly provide a new treatment option for people suffering from the disease worldwide.
“We have been studying master regulators of cell metabolism, which are present in malignant cells but not in healthy cells. We have found that blocking activities of these metabolic regulators or removing them from Myeloma cells makes them susceptible to death.
“This funding will enable us to continue conducting a series of laboratory investigations to see if depriving Myeloma cells of regulators of metabolism will restore the ability of current available drugs to treat Myeloma effectively. We will collaborate with clinicians and scientists from three haematological centres in London, Leeds, and St. Gallen in Switzerland.
“If successful, our work will lead to the testing of new drugs in combination with current anti-myeloma medications in the laboratory and, if deemed, in people. We hope that our work could rapidly lead to clinical trials of new drugs, which could give people with Myeloma a better chance of survival.”
2022
Finding the power to shut down a key blood cancer causing protein
Dr Ricardo Fernandes and his team at the Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford used the £25,000 award to engineer and screen different antibodies to find a way to stop mutations in the FLT3 protein from causing Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) in patients. The research aimed at finding a way to shut down a specific malfunctioning protein linked with a high number of blood cancer cases.
In the light of current statistics, the team are in no doubt as to just how important this research is in the fight against blood cancer. “On average less than 15 per cent of AML patients will survive longer than five years. FLT3 is a significant contributory factor, it’s really pushing this disease and we have to shut it down,” said Dr Fernandes.
Dr Fernandes said the research is focusing on the FLT3 receptor, as figures also show that of the 3,000 people diagnosed with AML in the UK each year, on average 1,000 of them will have the malfunctioning FLT3 protein.
The problem is compounded by the fact that with many different types of FLT3 mutations, current drugs for patients only target some and not all, which means only a few of the thousand people diagnosed with AML each year will benefit from those treatments.
“FLT3 is one of the many thousands of proteins present in myeloid cells in the blood and most of the time it functions normally, but occasionally it will tell the cell to keep dividing and this can give rise to AML,” said Dr Fernandes. “What would be great is if we had a drug that would target all FLT3 mutations and shut down FLT3 signalling, regardless of the type of mutation,” he added.
“The grant funding from LMRUK is enabling us to focus on FLT3 and use the technology we have to screen millions of different antibodies. We can then select the ones that have the right properties to target FLT3 and boost the activity of enzymes to shut it down.
“Ultimately, it is about engineering antibodies to shut down a malfunctioning FLT3 receptor by boosting the activity of naturally occurring enzymes and stop it causing AML.”
Dr Fernandes said that the grant money will help the team move the research forward more quickly and allow them to focus all their attention over the next year on tackling the FLT3 receptor problem. It will ultimately help in the development of a prototype for a drug that can be used as an effective treatment in the future.
He hopes that moving forward, this type of research could be applied to other types of cancer too.
“If we can understand what happens with FLT3 and how we can shut down these types of proteins, we will be in a much better place to tackle other malfunctioning proteins that cause other cancers” he added.
Update – Two years on and Dr Fernandes has revealed that in part, as a result of that initial work, further support has been forthcoming through funding for a five-year Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship to a Postdoctoral Researcher.
The Wellcome Trust funding allows the department to continue the work and widen its investigations, with the potential to assist patients with other forms of cancer as well as AML.
Dr Fernandes said: “That initial piece of work which we managed to do with support from LMRUK gave us the initial data to guide the design of novel molecules that attempt to reduce aberrant FLT3 signals and to put forward the application for a Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship, which are highly prestigious and very difficult to get.”
2021
Novel research into cell signalling abnormalities in leukaemia cells was funded by annual grant scheme.
Dr Rhys Morgan
Dr Rhys Morgan, a leukaemia researcher and lecturer in Biomedical Science, has been given the green light to start the first phase of a new research pilot into the oncogenic protein, β-catenin and how it controls protein expression in leukaemia cells.
The grant will enable Dr Morgan to undertake cutting edge sequencing analyses to understand how β-catenin controls the critical steps between gene activation and protein expression; a process frequently hijacked by blood cancer cells.
“These funds have allowed us to perform an expensive, but highly informative, technique called RNA sequencing (RNAseq) to understand how the cancer promoting protein β-catenin causes inappropriate gene activation in leukaemia cells, an analysis not previously undertaken before.
“We have evidence to suggest that β-catenin may hijack the critical steps between DNA activation and protein formation to promote the activity of genes which increase leukaemia cell growth and survival. Understanding these mechanisms in more detail could lead to the design of new treatments which disrupt this activity and halt leukaemia development and progression.
“The evidence for this first emerged from a scientific paper we published back in 2019, however without such vital funding from charities like LMRUK, we simply wouldn’t be able to pursue these promising avenues of research. The hard work of the charity’s volunteers and fundraisers does not go unnoticed, and I’d like them to know they are making a real difference to researchers like myself,” said Dr Morgan.
2020
A Molecular Biologist has been awarded funding to support a new method of research into blood cancer
Dr Salvatore Papa, an Assistant Professor in Cancer Research at the University of Leeds was awarded in 2020 a research grant to continue his specialist studies into examining how the accumulation of mutated proteins in certain blood cancer cells allow them to multiply repeatedly. These findings can then be used to investigate how to prevent these mutations from occurring by blocking the process.
The research is conducted by a group of scientists, led by Dr Papa, collaborating and drawing on their different skills and expertise to get clear results and conclusions.
Dr Papa has a strong background in Molecular Biology and is a proud member of the 250 Great Minds Academic Programme in the Leeds Institute of Medical Research, one of the biggest research institutes in the Faculty of Medicine and Health.
Dr Papa said: “I’ve always had a keen interest in solving complicated tasks, and thus, I was naturally attracted to understand the complexities of the intracellular mechanisms and how this works is what drives me and is the foundation behind my research. I currently split my time between supervising and teaching PhD students and post-doctoral scientists and spending long hours researching in the lab. Being passionate about my work and finding results which can potentially save lives and fight diseases is what it’s all about for me.”
2018
Dr Paul Hole, a Senior Post-Doctoral Research Scientist at Cardiff University was awarded a grant in 2018 to fund research into the biology of leukaemia using novel, gene-editing approaches.
Focussing on cellular and genetic pathology, Dr Hole has completed a preliminary study into gene-editing and the grant will allow him to further expand upon his research.
The research is looking at the effects of ‘deleting’ harmful genes from blood cancer cells as a way of studying AML, and assessing how the remaining cells react once these genes have been removed. Dr Hole believes this could lead to new treatments for blood cancers.
Dr Hole explained: “You don’t have to go far to find someone who has been affected by cancer in some way and it is something I’m passionate about researching and helping to fight. I want my research to change and to save lives.
AML is a rare and aggressive type of blood cancer that can develop rapidly. It that affects around 2,600 people each year in the UK. AML can affect anyone; however, it is most common in people over the age of 65.
Dr Hole continued: “The grant money will support the continued developmental work into gene-editing approaches to study and fight AML. The data I gather will help inform a paper which, once published, will detail the potential of this process.
“The study is still very much in the early stages, but I’m hoping that in the future this research can be translated into a treatment process for AML and potentially other cancers too.”
