Researchers headed by a team at the University of Basel have developed an approach to treating leukemia that involves “deleting” the affected blood system by removing the leukemia patient’s blood cells in a targeted manner, while simultaneously building up a new, healthy system with donor hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). The strategy involves harnessing an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) targeting the pan-hematopoietic marker, CD45, to enable antigen-specific deletion of the entire affected hematopoietic system, including HSCs.
Reporting on their work in Nature (“Selective hematological cancer eradication with preserved hematopoiesis”) the team, led by Lukas Jeker, PhD, from the department of biomedicine at the University of Basel, described promising results from studies in animal models and in human cells in the laboratory. In their paper, the team concluded, “The combination of CD45-targeting ADCs and engineered HSCs creates an almost universal strategy to replace a diseased hematopoietic system, irrespective of disease etiology or originating cell type. We propose that this approach could have broad implications beyond hematological malignancies.”