Leukaemia is a type of blood cancer that usually affects white blood cells and bone marrow. White blood cells are an important part of your immune system that fight infection, and bone marrow is where blood cells like these are made.
There are many different types of leukaemia. Some types develop faster, and are known as acute leukaemia. These include acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), acute premyelocytic leukaemia (APL), and B or T-cell acute lympoblastic leukaemia.
But each type of leukaemia acts differently, and will need to be treated differently.
Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) is an acute form of leukaemia, or cancer of the white blood cells found in the bone marrow. ALL happens when white blood cells don’t mature properly and grow too fast, and end up building up in the bone marrow, crowding out healthy blood cells. ALL develops more quickly than some other blood cancers, so quick diagnosis and treatment are really important.
There are different types of ALL. The most common are B cell ALL, T cell ALL, and Philadelphia positive ALL. These are all types of ALL that affect children as well as adults, but childhood and adult ALL are different. In this section we have included only research that is relevant to adults, so for information on childhood leukaemia research please go here for ALL projects, and here for AML.
We are supporting a number of ALL research projects that are looking into what causes leukaemia, and how treatment resistance emerges and what we can do to reverse it. We also have an exciting project that is looking at a new targeted treatment that is called ‘oncolytic virus therapy’.