BIG SCREEN: Cancer researcher Jun Yang of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and his colleagues combed through data on 3,801 children with ALL.ST. JUDE/SETH DIXON
There are cancers with mutated genes, and then there’s hypodiploid acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). This rare subtype of ALL, a childhood leukemia, is characterized by deletions of whole chromosomes—and worse survival rates than other subtypes. More than 90 percent of ALL patients, but fewer than half of pediatric hypodiploid ALL patients, survive with treatment. In 2013, researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and colleagues looked into whether there was anything distinctive about the gene variants carried by patients with hypodiploid leukemia. Within a cohort they examined, they found, first, that the subtype itself has two subtypes; and then, in one of those, called low hypodiploid ALL, 91 percent of patients carried certain variants of the TP53 gene, which codes for the tumor-suppressing protein p53 ...
