Epigenetic Control of Gene Expression in Leukaemia and Haematopoiesis

儿童急性淋巴细胞白血病（ALL）曾经是一种无法治愈的疾病。值得庆幸的是，对ALL的一般护理已经大大改善，大约90%的儿童被治愈。不幸的是，仍然有罕见的ALL亚型有复发的倾向，无法治疗。我们正试图了解这些罕见的、无法治愈的all的分子细节，以便设计新的治疗方法。为了做到这一点，我们研究表观遗传学如何影响基因调控。基因由DNA组成，它们驻留在细胞核中，在细胞核中充当细胞的硬件，需要“读取”才能发挥功能。当基因被不恰当地读取（或者我们称之为“激活”）时，就会导致异常行为，比如癌症生长。表观遗传学是指不直接储存在DNA本身的信息。例如，一些表观遗传信息存储在由组蛋白携带的化学修饰中，组蛋白在染色质结构中与DNA相互作用。越来越清楚的是，不仅异常的表观遗传变化在许多人类疾病（如白血病）中很常见，而且这些变化就其本质而言是可逆的。我们的目标是帮助设计针对这些可逆表观遗传变化的治疗方法。

Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) in children used to be a disease that was untreatable. Thankfully, general care for ALL has greatly improved so that ~90% of children are cured. Unfortunately, there are still rare subsets of ALL that have a tendency to relapse and are untreatable. We are trying to understand the molecular details of these rare, incurable ALLs in order to design new therapies. In order to do this, we study how epigenetics impacts gene regulation. Genes are made up DNA, and they reside in the nucleus, where they act as hardware for the cell that needs to be "read" in order to be functional. When genes are read (or what we call "activated")inappropriately, this can cause aberrant behaviour such as cancerous growth. Epigenetics is information that is not stored directly in the DNA itself. For example, some epigenetic information is stored in chemical modifications carried by histone proteins that interact with DNA in a structure called chromatin. It is becoming clear not only that aberrant epigenetic changes are common in many human diseases such as leukaemia, but that these changes by their very nature are reversible. Our goal is to help design therapies that can target these reversible epigenetic changes.