Dr Anand Chokkalingam, University of California Berkeley

Dr Anand Chokkalingam & Professor Patricia Buffler, University of California Berkeley; Dr Elizabeth Trachtenberg, Children’s Hospital and Research Center, Oakland, California

There is a substantial body of evidence supporting a role for infections in the causation of childhood leukaemia.

Some studies suggest that childhood leukaemia may develop as an abnormal immune response to specific, but as-yet-unidentified, infections brought into a community by an influx of new people.

Another theory is that the initiating event in childhood leukaemia takes place whilst the child is still in the womb and a second event in childhood, perhaps exposure to an infection, triggers the development of full-blown leukaemia.

To advance our understanding of the role of infections, Dr Chokkalingam and colleagues with the Northern California Childhood Leukemia Study are investigating the major histocompatability complex (MHC), a cluster of genes essential to the immune system including the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes, which are critical in cellular recognition of infections and other foreign exposures.

The research team will use information and samples from children enrolled in the Northern California Childhood Leukemia Study, a major ongoing case-control study.

They will use the latest technology to examine the MHC regions of children diagnosed with leukaemia and those of healthy controls, looking for differences between the two sets of children to see whether genetic variation in the MHC is associated with susceptibility to or protection from childhood ALL.

The MHC data will be linked with records of infectious exposures for both sets of children to see how this impacts on risk.

This work will advance current knowledge of immune-related causes of childhood leukaemia and may ultimately lead to the identification of susceptible sub-populations of children based on variation in genes of the immune system.

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