In person seminar with Dr. Sachlos

Acute myeloid leukemia is a fatal blood cancer.  The malignant AML blast cells rapidly overwhelm the bone marrow, disrupting resident hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) and normal blood production and eventually causing death. Treatment involves the administration of DNA-binding chemotherapeutic agents that indiscriminately kill both HSC and progenitors, leading to myelosuppression and ultimately drug dose attenuation.  Ideally, drugs should specifically target AML while sparing healthy HSC to reduce potentially lethal myelosuppression side effects and extend the dosing period.  In this talk, we will discuss the new paradigm of leukemic stem cells and how they can be targeted using differentiation therapy as a novel therapeutic strategy with reduced side effects.  The development of novel stem cell screening platforms able to identify agents that specifically target AML-leukemic stem cells (AML-LSC) while sparing HSC will be explored.  Recent results demonstrating the importance of engineered niche microenvironments to extend the ex vivo lifespan of HSC and AML-LSC will also be presented.  This work sets the foundations high-throughput 3D organoid drug screening using primary human cells extracted from tumours for the development of precision medicine applications.