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leukaemia

A team at St Mary's Hospital in Manchester is developing exciting breakthroughs which could eventually lead to a vaccine to prevent childhood leukaemia.

Rogue cancer causing genes have already been identified but more recently it has been found that not all children born with these genes do go on to develop cancer.

What the Manchester team is now trying to find out is why not. What protects some children and not others?

Dr Malcolm Taylor who is heading the team, said: 'It is very exciting. We had previously assumed that once babies were born with the rogue gene, leukaemia would be inevitable, but we now know that is not the case.

''We need to identify what immune response kills off these cells then we could perhaps replicate that and produce a vaccine.''

The team is bidding to buy a state-of-the art DNA sequencer to enable them to look more closely at the rogue genes to try and find out why some babies can beat them and others cannot.

What they do know is that the rogue genes are not inherited which is why leukaemia strikes with such random savageness.

Some scientists believe that the same environmental forces that cause cancer in adults such as smoking and alcohol could warp the gene while the baby is still in the womb.

But Dr Taylor said: ''That does not explain teenage leukaemias, where the gene must have been been altered sometime during childhood.

''There is still a lot of uncertainty and controversy about the reasons why these genes change and become potentially cancerous.''

There is also some evidence of a link between childhood infection and the development of leukaemia. And it is not the sickly children who are at risk.

It would appear that if a child has been protected from infection while young the immune system has not been 'programmed' and so cannot kick in when something major goes wrong.

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