“We are making a major effort to develop new and effective therapies for infant and childhood leukaemia by:

• Identifying the genetic events required for a normal blood cell to be a leukaemia cell.
• Establish the hierarchy of these changes to identify those that are absolutely essential for leukaemia.
• Target those events using new drugs e.g. ones specifically designed to block that genetic event and no other.

Currently, there is no co-ordinated effort to use the new approaches based on our knowledge of the information provided by the human genome sequence to understand infant and childhood leukaemia. As well as this, there is no co-ordinated effort to apply such knowledge to developing novel therapies for infant/childhood leukaemia. Our group is now providing that effort and in addition to our basic research we have have the clinical expertise to apply any promising therapies to patients in the shortest time possible.”
Dr. Hugh Brady, Head of MHCB &

Prof. Ian Hann, Consultant Haematologist at GOSH – March 2003