says João T. Barata, coordinator of the study.
The alterations in protein IL-7R may thereby help understand the molecular players involved in leukemia onset and help better development of targeted treatments.
Although chemotherapy is efficient in more than 80% of pediatric cases, the efficiency comes down to half among adults along with the emergence of secondary effects.
“It’s important to find new therapeutic strategies to improve the efficacy of the current treatments and to reduce the probability of secondary effects. The mice we generated develop leukemia with very similar characteristics to that found in humans. These mice can be used to identify and test new treatments, such as drugs that decrease the activation of IL-7R, including some that we discovered in this work”, says Afonso Almeida, first author of the study.
Source: Medindia
