Investigating the microenvironment in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Investigating the microenvironment in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia and Lymphomas via interrogation of tissue and blood samples from patients, with comparison to healthy donor samples.
IRAS ID
168782
Contact name
Laura M Cronin
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 9 months, 26 days
Research summary
A microenvironment is a niche within tissue, consisting of various cell types, which together maintain and support particular individual cells. In cancer such microenvironments allow the malignant cells to survive and grow.
Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia (CLL) and lymphomas are malignancies of B cells within the blood. These malignant cells are able to survive, divide and withstand many chemotherapeutics by residing within microenvironments, largely within lymph node tissues. Full understanding of these tissues will allow the development of better treatments to effectively target these sites of disease support.
This project will study the microenvironment, specifically in the lymph node of CLL and lymphomas, to procure a holistic understanding of them. It will study and identify the interactions occurring between non-malignant and malignant cells by;
1) Chemically staining the disease tissue allowing resident cells to be studied for their presence, proportion and proximity to malignant cells.
2) Culturing of cells identified as present in the microenvironment of CLL and lymphomas, using cells isolated from patients (malignant cells) and healthy volunteers (healthy cells).
Blood from CLL/lymphoma patients is already ethically approved (REC No 10/H1206/58). This application seeks ethical approval for utilisation of healthy donor blood from volunteers and access to anonymised banked human CLL/lymphoma patient lymph node and bone marrow tissues.
For healthy donor blood sample donation, eligibility criteria will follow the guidelines set by the National Health Service Blood and Transplant Authority. For access to patient tissue, only tissue collected and banked by a Research Tissue Bank and anonymised prior to release for research will be eligible for use.
All research will be conducted on a single academic site (University of Birmingham). This project will last until 26th September 2015. The only participants directly involved in the study are healthy donor volunteers required to consent to giving blood for research.REC name
North East - Tyne & Wear South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/NE/0045
Date of REC Opinion
23 Feb 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion