Leukemia gene discovery

Sewa Rijal, PhD student

PhD student Ms Sewa Rijal (Australian Centre for Blood Diseases) and her supervisor Dr Andrew Wei, from the Alfred Hospital, are respectively first and last authors on a paper published in the journal Blood last week.

The  group of researchers found that when the protein INPP4B was found in patients with leukemia, they did not respond to chemotherapy. Sewa told ABC, "[T]his protein can be used as another biomarker of the disease... [W]e're focusing on how it acts in leukemic cells to cause chemoresistance. So if we can find out how it works, then we can target the protein and the pathway to then treat acute myeloid leukemia more effectively."
Reference: http://www.bloodjournal.org/content/early/2015/03/03/blood-2014-09-603555
09/03/2015 ABC news story link: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2015/s4194074.htm?source=rss