Erin Guest, MD, Hematology/Oncology/BMT, received a two-year $250,000 Noah Wilson’s Fund for Pediatric Cancer Research (Noah’s Fund) grant from Noah’s Bandage Project.

The funding will be used for her study “A CRISPR genetic screen in an induced pluripotent stem cell model to discover modifiers of therapy-related pediatric leukemia.”

While the cure rates for pediatric leukemia have improved over the past few decades, children with leukemia in which the KMT2A gene is rearranged have not benefitted from advances in therapies and continue to have a devastating prognosis.

Dr. Guest and her study team will address this unmet need by defining new genes and genetic pathways involved in leukemia progression and response to current chemotherapeutics, using a novel engineered stem cell model of pediatric leukemia.

“This study is the first of its kind, and we anticipate it will generate fundamental, mechanistic insight into leukemia progression and evolution that can be shared with other researchers and will become widely used to study new treatments for leukemia involving KMT2A, in both children and adults,” wrote Dr. Guest.

John Perry, PhD, Hematology/Oncology/BMT, and Jay Vivian, PhD, Rare Disease Model Research Program, will also serve as investigators on the study. Scott Younger, PhD, Genomic Medicine Center, will serve as a co-investigator. 

Noah Wilson was diagnosed with cancer in April of 2014 when he was only 6 years old. Noah passed away in June of 2015, but not before starting his Bandage Project and making a huge difference in the world. Dr. Guest was Noah’s oncologist. Dr. Guest and her team are taking the information they learn from the genomes of leukemia samples from infants to test new treatments in the lab. The funds from Noah’s Bandage Project are funding this testing, as well as genomic sequencing studies both before and after the leukemia cells are treated.