Inducing blood cancer cell death with a new therapy

Associate Professor Ross Dickins

by Anne Crawford

In patients with the blood cancer, acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), immature white blood cells in the bone marrow and blood become locked into a state of perpetual proliferation.

Most AML patients are treated with chemotherapy, which induces leukaemia cell death. However, some patients can also be treated with differentiation therapy, which instead triggers the maturation of leukaemia cells and stops their proliferation. Several new differentiation therapies have been clinically approved for AML patients, but their mechanisms of action are poorly understood.

Associate Professor Ross Dickins’ laboratory has been focussing on understanding the behaviour of AML cells exposed to differentiation therapy. 


“AML is usually treated with toxic chemotherapy, but for some AML subtypes differentiation therapy can be used and is extremely effective,” he said.

A/Prof Dickins, laboratory head at the Australian Centre for Blood Diseases (ACBD), has been funded more than $800,000 by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) over three years to build on extensive preliminary work examining relapse following AML differentiation therapy. His lab recently revealed plasticity in cancer stem cell maturation in AML, highlighting the need to therapeutically eradicate leukaemia cells that persist across a range of differentiation states.

“This project uses mouse and human models of AML differentiation therapy to understand how mature leukaemia cells are cleared from the body and how some cancer cells persist,” he said. “These studies will improve our understanding of differentiation therapy response, with the overall goal of improving AML patient treatments.”

A/Prof Ross Dickins, CIA on the project, will work with Professor Andrew Perkins and A/Prof Andrew Wei (also ACBD).