Team Discovers Key to Fighting Drug-Resistant Leukemia, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Study

Doctors who treat children with the most common form of childhood cancer – acute lymphoblastic leukemia – are often baffled at how sometimes the cancer cells survive their best efforts and the most powerful modern cancer drugs. Now a team of scientists led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have uncovered the basis for this drug resistance: BCL6, a protein that leukemia cells use to stay alive. Targeting this protein may be the key to fighting drug-resistant leukemia, a discovery that may make cancer drugs more powerful and help doctors formulate powerful drug cocktails to cure more children of leukemia.