The project is joining forces with the department of haematology at Hammersmith Hospital, led by Professor John Goldman, and clinical trials among leukaemia patients will be performed within the next two years. The possibilities for new treatments are enormous. This clinical trial is vital to find out if the technique works as well as we hope it will do. This could well be the chink in the armour cancer doctors have been looking for. Around 18,000 people are diagnosed with leukaemia or one of the related cancers of the blood in the UK every year.
Most people think that leukaemia is a form of cancer of the blood.
This is not strictly correct, leukaemia is really a cancer of the bone marrow. The bone marrow is found in the marrow cavities of the long bones, ribcage and pelvis and contains many different types of cells which actually produce all the various types of blood cells. The bone marrow is the blood making factory of the body producing hundreds of millions of red and white blood cells each and every day of our lives. If one of these bone marrow cells becomes cancerous it starts to grow and divide aggressively out of all control and pushes out all the normal blood making cells from the bone marrow. Consequently normal blood production ceases and the bone marrow and blood begin to fill up with cancerous leukaemia cells which serve no useful function.