Established in 1992, the REACH Fund supports research into cancer and blood disorders in childhood, with the aim of improving methods of diagnosis and treatment. REACH also funds education and advanced training along with projects to apply the latest scientific findings to clinical practice.

How is the money used?

Money raised for REACH is used in a number of ways:

  • Towards items of lab. Equipment for research e.g. the Gene Chip facility which allows the examination of the effects of specific diseases or chemotherapy on all known human genes.
  • Start-up grants to carefully selected new research ideas ? many of these go on to become bigger projects funded by national and international groups.
  • Towards medical, scientific and nursing staff?s attendance at conferences and workshops to discuss and collate data and learn new techniques.

Examples of scientific equipment we would like to fund

We obtain research funding from Cancer Research UK, the Medical Research Council, the Leukaemia Research Fund and the Wellcome Trust. The REACH fund pays for things for which funding is not available elsewhere and which are essential for our continued and future success. For example, small grants to allow our scientists to visit other labs and learn new techniques, small items of essential equipment and pilot studies to test innovative ideas that may develop into major lines of research. Without the money from the REACH fund our researchers could not easily test our innovative ideas as the large national funding organizations are not easily able to fund small-scale studies.

Examples of small pieces of essential equipment that we currently need and that we could use the REACH fund to buy are:

  • AutoMACS system - �24,000
    This system allows us to purify specific types of cells in bulk for biochemical analysis. For example, we often need to purify progenitor B cells from whole blood. This system is the most efficient way to do that to a high degree of purity.
  • Scharfe Cell Counter - �16,950
    This machine allows us to count the number of cells within a population automatically rather than using the very time-consuming manual method we currently use. It will also allow us to automatically count the different types of cells within a give blood sample.
  • X-Ray film processor - �11,760
    We use radioactivity in many different techniques to identify DNA, RNA and protein. The end point of all these techniques is exposure of the sample to X-ray film for visualisation. We need a new processor to allow us to do this, our current processor is so old that some parts are no longer made for it. Our current machine is on its last legs.

Leukaemia

Leukaemia accounts for almost half of the cancers in children and there are more than 400 new cases per year in the UK. Although this is a rare set of diseases, it is the second commonest cause of death in children beyond one month of life, and thus is a major child healthcare issue. By 1970 there were virtually no survivors of leukaemia. Progress in the following 30 years has been substantial, such that nearly two thirds of children diagnosed with leukaemia survive at least 5 years after diagnosis. This has been achieved as a consequence of international collaboration and research and clinical trials.

However, this success has been bought at a high cost in many cases, for instance where fertility and hormones are impaired following bone marrow transplant or where heart function is sometimes poor following chemotherapy. Clearly we need more specific magic bullet-like therapies that can attack the leukaemia at its most basic level. Not only will these probably be more effective, but almost certainly would produce less side effects. The development of these therapies is the main aim of our research. The chances of success are high because of the enormous expertise within our Unit in the molecular genetic techniques, which are allowing us to gain a fundamental understanding of the basis of leukaemia as well as our collaboration with expert new drug development.

The diagnosis of a child with leukaemia is always a tragedy for a family. Coping with the possible death and definite intensive and difficult treatments is a nearly impossible task with which every parent struggles. Our therapy is very successful in two thirds of patients, but even in those there are always serious side effects ranging from hair loss through nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea to life-threatening chemical disturbances and infection. Tragically, due to this currently necessary blunderbuss approach, the death rate from the treatment itself varies between 2 and 10%. Dying from such complication is a double tragedy and we desperately need specific and less toxic therapies, which can be tailored to the individual patient.

We are making a major effort to develop new and effective therapies for infant and childhood leukaemia by:

  1. Identifying the genetic events required for a normal blood cell to be a leukaemia cell
  2. Establish the hierarchy of these changes to identify those that are absolutely essential for leukaemia
  3. Target those events using new drugs e.g. ones specifically designed to block that genetic event and no other.
There is no co-ordinated effort to use the new approaches based on our knowledge of the information provided by the human genome sequence to understand infant/childhood leukaemia. There is no co-ordinated effort to apply such knowledge to developing novel therapies for infant/childhood leukaemia. Our Unit is now providing that effort and in addition to our basic research we have the clinical expertise to apply any promising therapies to patients in the shortest time possible.