Leukemia

I was going to call this "The Other Blood Cancer," but that made leukemia sound a little too much like pork.

A couple of leukemia-themed items that are related to lymphoma (in good ways).

First, Dr. Janet Rowley is going to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rowley is a leukemia researcher, and is best known for showing that there is a genetic basis for cancer (particularly blood cancers). In other words, she showed there are abnormalities in genes that may result in cancer. This is the kind of research that leads to "personalization therapy" -- figuring out whether a particular treatment will work on an individual patient before it is administered. Her more recent research looks at chromosomal abnormalities in both leukemias and lymphomas. Her research "revolutionalized how cancer is understood and treated." Always nice to have someone in The Family be recognized with the nation's highest civilian honor.

And in other news: last week, an article was published in the journal Cell that described research on how leukemia cells (and possibly those of other cancers) can go undetected by the body. Usually, an abnormal cell (the kind that can cause cancer if it gets out of hand) is detected by the body and is basically eaten by a cell called a macrophage. Researchers have discovered that certain leukemia cells have a protein called CD47 on their surface. This protein acts as an "invisibility cloak," telling the macrophages "Don't eat me!" (Those were the terms used in the article I linked to. I love it.) The invisibility cloak allows the cancer cells to move through the spleen, liver, and bone marrow -- the places where macrophages would normally eat them. Instead, the cells attach themselves to those places. CD47 is usually present on normal blood stem cells, which is what allows them to travel through the body as they develop. The researchers found that using an anti-CD47 antibody (like the way Rituxin targets CD20), they were able to remove the cloak and allow the macrophages to kill off the cancer cells, based on the level of CD47 on the cell (cancer cells have higher levels, so the normal tem cells were left alone).

The CD47 discovery may end up helping us understand more cancers than the one that was researched (acute myeloid leukemia). Indeed, CD47 was first discovered on ovarian cancer cells. So this could be another step for lymphoma.