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Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Case Study

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After their successful work with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, St. Jude Children’s Hospital decided to expand their efforts outwards and focus on another type of leukemia that attacks the lives of children every year. Acute Myeloid Leukemia, a cancer that begins in bone marrow and quickly multiplies and spreads to white blood cells, makes up 20% of all childhood leukemia (Pui 51). The first AML study at St. Jude began in 1986. Before the start of this project, only one child out of every 58 children suffering from this illness survived for a time greater than five years; however, by the end of the first study completed in 1973, the rate of remission had increased to 66%. Although St. Jude was ecstatic that they had brought the rate of remission …show more content…

Jude has continued to go beyond other hospitals in the United States when it comes to research in the Pediatric Genome Project. Organizing the genetic base of complex diseases like pediatric cancer has been the hardest challenge scientists have had to overcome in order to understand the molecular background of certain disease (Hussain). In order to create a treatment with the hopes of ending childhood cancer, St. Jude Children’s Hospital recognized the importance of designing a project that would allow them to organize the “landscape” of certain mutations commonly appeared in a specific disease. In January 2010, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital collaborated with Washington University to play an essential role in completing the Pediatric Cancer Genome Project, an international effort to identify the genetic mutations that cause the formation of cancer tumors and to develop new treatments to target these illnesses. This three- year, $65 million dollar project was developed in order to sequence the genetic orientation of over 600 pediatric tumors and non-tumor “germline” samples. After the completion of this project, researchers were shocked at the success from this project (Downing). This study concluded that “variations in repetitive DNA sequences, heterogeneity within tumor samples, and mutations affecting the regulatory regions of genes” are the focus of the Pediatric Cancer Genome Project’s team after completing their complex study of the genome

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