Liling Wan, PhD

Acute myeloid leukemia is the deadliest blood cancer. The mainstay chemotherapeutic treatments have met with limited success, and most patients will die from their disease. Thus, New treatments are desperately needed. To address this need, we have identified a cellular pathway leukemia cells rely on to live. In this project, we have developed an inhibitor that blocks this pathway and found that it kills leukemia grown in mice. We would like to understand why some leukemia cells rely on this pathway to survive and what determines the response to the inhibitor. If successful, our work will provide preclinical evidence for a new pathway as a target for acute myeloid leukemia and offer needed knowledge and chemical tools to guide future clinical studies. We are hopeful that our findings could lead to improvements in the lives of AML patients.