BCI at ASH 2015

The first week of December saw San Diego, California host the 58th ASH Annual Meeting. BCI researchers from our Centre for Haemato-Oncology attended and joined "top minds in the field" at this blood cancer specialist conference.

Professor John Gribben chaired in the Educational Session "New Approaches in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and Prolymphocytic Leukemia".

Dr Silvia Montoto, consultant and honorary senior lecturer in the Centre, also gave a talk in the Educational Session on "Treatment of the Patient with Transformed Lymphoma".

Dr Li Jia's first year PhD student Faith Norstor delivered an oral presentation and was awarded the ASH young scientist abstract achievement award; a UK CLL forum travel award and a British Society for Haematology travel grant. Prof. Gribben said,

"A truly remarkable achievement at this stage of her thesis work"

PhD student Faith Norstor (right) presents with previous BCI researcher Dr Fabienne McClanahan chairing (centre)

Faith's talk was titled "Overexpression of HMGB1 receptor RAGE is associated with worse clinical outcome in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia".

Previous work in the group has identified significantly increased levels of the protein HMGB1 in the blood plasma of CLL patients and found that it is associated with poor clinical outcome. RAGE is the main cell surface receptor for HMGB1.

Faith presented current work - they determined that CLL patients with high RAGE expression have worse overall survival compared to patients with low RAGE expression. They also found that RAGE/TLR9 receptors are activated following HMGB1 treatment in primary CLL cells, causing activation of NF-kB.

Each year we are proud of our researchers and students who attend this world-renowned meeting, and 2015 has been no exception. Follow our News to stay up to date with our blood cancer research progress.