Project aims to show how treatment resistance develops

Research is not always straightforward. Sometimes a medicine works differently than expected – or sometimes it doesn’t work at all.

That’s why it’s really important to test new childhood cancer treatments and make sure they will work.

Testing treatments on patients straight away can be dangerous, so researchers have to develop ‘models’ to work on in the lab.

These models mimic how cancer behaves in the body, from how cancer cells grow to how the immune system reacts.

Developing models can be difficult for rare cancers, or when researchers are trying to understand how cancers survive treatment.

Burkitt lymphoma, a type of childhood blood cancer, is one of these cancers. It is rare and needs very strong treatments, which sometimes don’t work. If the cancer doesn’t respond to treatment, or grows back, it is very hard to cure.

Funded by The Little Princess Trust, Dr Simon Bomken at Newcastle University is working on new models for Burkitt lymphoma. These models aim to show how treatment resistance develops and how the cancer survives treatment.

Since starting this project in September 2023, Simon’s team has successfully grown Burkitt lymphoma cells in the lab. This is the first step toward creating the complicated models that can be used to study treatment resistance.

Creating models is just one part of Simon’s project. He also hopes to compare genetics to find out what makes some patients’ cancer almost untreatable.

The researchers have almost finished preparing to investigate which genes are important. They will compare newly diagnosed Burkitt lymphoma cells to treatment-resistant cells.

Simon hopes that this will help them understand the processes that make cancer cells survive treatment, identifying new ways to fight this cancer.

If the team can find a way to kill treatment-resistant cells, it would save lives and potentially lead to kinder treatment strategies.

Find out more about this project here.