Featured Expert:
Catherine J. Wu, MD
Chief, Division of Transplant and Cellular Therapy
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Dr. Catherine Wu highlights collaboration among researchers as a key to advancing CLL genomics, with the CLL Global Research Foundation serving as an essential hub for international research efforts. Dr. Wu also shares that while research has made significant strides in improving patient care and outcomes, the next challenge is achieving a cure.
Transcript
Dr. Catherine Wu:
As I started my career and in my work on CLL genomics, it became clear that an important part of our work was collaboration, and collaboration with CLL leaders, both in North America, but also in Europe and other parts of the world. CLL Global, the Research Foundation, has really been a nexus point for all of those collaborative studies. So it made a lot of sense to start to work together with the CLL Global Research Foundation and try to think about how we could forge these larger collaborative studies.
So the CLL Global Research Foundation has been really foundational for a lot of the work that we do in CLL genomics. Our field has moved evermore from what we consider bulk genomics. So looking at sequencing data en masse to thinking about heterogeneity, how one CLL case differs from the other, and that really mandates the use of single cell sequencing technologies.
CLL Global Research Foundation has really been supportive of our studies to try to understand the heterogeneity in CLL itself, but also the co-occurring immune response that’s present and coexisting together with CLL cells. So we’ve been monitoring how those immune cell populations change over time in the presence of CLL. We’ve also looked in the setting of therapy and most recently we’ve been also trying to look at the dynamics in relationship to therapy.
I think that we’ve gotten to a point right now thanks to all the exciting investigative work that’s been going on, that we’ve maybe tamed the beast and we’ve really made huge inroads into improvements in patient outcomes. But I think really the next quantum leap is thinking about how we can get to cure. How can we sustain the decrement in leukemic burden in our patients, and maybe at some level also restore proper immune function that will help us keep our patients well for the time to come?
