Leukemia

Hard work is starting to pay off in the lab. My work involves trying to identify a tumor supressor gene involved in therapy related leukemia. From previous work in the lab, we have identified about 20 genes that are lost in every patient with this subset of this disease. Our working hypothesis is that one of these genes is acting as a tumor suprresor and loss of it leads to tumor progression. There is some really interesting data on one of the genes and implicates it as a classical tumor supressor gene. The mice I have been studying are missing either one or both copies of this gene. If my mice develop a similar form of leukemia, that suggests that this gene acts as a tumor supressor. That is exactly what we are seeing in the mice. I met with one of the pathologists yesterday and he thinks we have leukemia in a couple of the mice. The picture is a cross section of the spleen from one of the mice. You can see a large cluster of dull purple cells in the center. These are imature myeloblasts. They are surrounded by the dark cells, these are erythroid cells, or maturing red blood cells. These cells can normally be found in the spleen at low numbers, but in this case these cells have comepletely taken over this organ. The bone marrow also shows dysplastic cells and increased numbers of erythroid cells. In the peripheral blood, the mice are anemic. In all, we are seeing ineffective erythropoiesis in the bone marrow, blasts and increased erthropoiesis in the spleen, and dysplastic neutrophils in the peripheral blood and bone marrow. In other words, we are starting to see leukemia.

Mice in research

Here is a good article for those of you who want to know more about the type of work I do everyday. cnn.com

Slight Corrections

I know Amanda gets really excited about some of my work…often more excited than I am. Things are going well at work and we are starting to see some of my mice get sick. It is to early to call it a success and retire. There are still many more mice I am following and the goal is to learn a little bit about the disease and try to understand the molecular basis for the disease. Thanks to everyone who has called, but it is still very early on and we are still trying to figure out exactly what is going on in these mice. More to come. The picture is from the animal fiacilty and in each of those cages are about 3-5 mice. I have approximately 500 mice down there, so when a couple of them get sick it is only scratching the surface in comparison to the work left ahead. Stay tuned.
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