Discover the real culprit of acute lymphocytic leukemia drug resistance and recurrence-thiopurines

Acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) is a cancer of the bone marrow that produces too many lymphocytes, which can occur in children or adults

The results of their research were published in the journal Nature Cancer

The researchers wrote: "Chemotherapy is the standard treatment for pediatric ALL, and it sometimes relapses as a feature of chemotherapy resistance

Dr.

This discovery provides the first direct genomic and experimental evidence for childhood cancers that drug-resistant mutations can be induced by chemotherapy, but they do not always appear in the diagnosis

Recurrence is still the leading cause of death in children and adolescents with ALL worldwide, although at St.

The researchers analyzed more than 1,000 samples collected from the United States, China, and Germany

Co-first author, Dr.

"This research has not only changed our thinking about the treatment of ALL, but it has also opened the door to studying how defect repair produces drug-resistant mutations," Zhou said

In the future, we may monitor the bone marrow during treatment to detect these mutation signals as early as possible to help identify high-risk patients.

Chemotherapy and mismatch repair deficiency cooperate to fuel TP53 mutagenesis and ALL relapse.