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Some people have a type of acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) that can be more difficult to treat. Professor Erika Mancini wants to test a drug that means cancerous cells are unable to repair themselves if they become damaged. The hope is that this will cause the cells to die and potentially create a new way to treat the disease.

A lady stood wearing a red Blood Cancer UK lab coat, smiling at the camera.

Professor Erika Mancini

Project information

Lead researcher

Professor Erika Mancini, University of Sussex

Research team
Related conditions
  • Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML)
Research type
  • Non-clinical
Region
  • South East
Grant awarded
  • Innovative Pilot Grant
Status
Ongoing
Funding award date
May 2026
Amount awarded

£29,991

Project completion date
January 2027

The challenge

AML is an aggressive blood cancer that can be difficult to treat. Some people with AML have a specific genetic change that causes their cancer cells to grow very quickly. This makes the disease much harder to treat and more likely to come back after treatment. Many treatments aren’t as effective for people with AML who have this genetic change and so there is a need to find new approaches that work in a different way.

The project

Professor Mancini and her team believe that because these AML cancer cells grow so quickly, they damage their own DNA. To survive, the AML cancer cells rely heavily on a repair protein that helps them to fix the damage and keep growing. The team have developed a new drug that blocks this repair protein. By blocking this protein, they believe the cancer cells will no longer be able to repair themselves and will die. They plan to test this new drug on AML cells in the lab and study what happens. This will help them to understand exactly how the drug works and whether it could be developed into a new treatment.

The future

If successful, this research could be an important first step towards a new treatment for people with this aggressive type of AML, stopping their cancer from coming back. In the longer term, this approach could also open up new ways to treat other fast-growing blood cancers that behave in a similar way.