Immune and functional profiling of blood cancers
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Immune and functional profiling of adult blood cancers to identify biomarkers relevant for clinical monitoring of present and upcoming therapies
IRAS ID
280215
Contact name
Naeem Khan
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Birmingham
Duration of Study in the UK
5 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Our research aims to improve how we detect blood cancer cells so that this information can translate into better disease detection, classification and management after treatment.
This work involves labelling patient cells (mainly white blood cells) with antibodies specific for cell markers that may be present or absent on cancer cells. This allows us to generate an immune profile, or immunophenotype, for each patient sample. Newer cell technologies allow us to measure more cell markers at once so we could like to test larger and novel combinations of cell markers, which may show specificity for disease. As there are different types of blood cancers and a lot of diversity within each cancer, this requires testing a large amount of samples so that we can identify immunophenotypes that associate with a given disease type.
We will also be testing sensitivity of patient cancer cells to novel therapies and whether the immunophenotype has any association with responses. Furthermore, the immunophenotype may be of importance for therapies which use the immune system to attack the cancer ie immunotherapies. We believe that the pre-existing immune profile of a patient would impact on the likely success of an immunotherapy on that patient. We thus aim to build datasets that could guide better use of these emerging therapies.
REC name
North West - Greater Manchester South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/NW/0286
Date of REC Opinion
3 Jul 2020
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion