leukaemia

Preventing liver damaging during leukaemia treatment

Dr Richard Burt is an Associate Professor of Haemato-oncology at Imperial College London, and an honorary Consultant Haematologist at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

Antibody drug conjugates are a type of medicine which are very effective for treating acute, often aggressive, forms of leukaemia. However, a serious side effect of these therapies is liver damage, which can be life-threatening in up to a fifth of people with these conditions. There is currently a poor understanding of what causes this liver damage, or why some people are more likely to experience it than others.

Dr Richard Burt and his team will, in collaboration with a team at MIT, use models of the human liver along with laboratory models of leukaemia to determine how the treatments cause liver damage. From this, they hope to be able to predict and identify liver damage earlier and ultimately develop approaches to prevent liver damage in the first place.