Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphona Research

Blood cancers are complex but we are confident that we can continue to improve the recovery rate. Support in this region for NEPAC has in the past made progress possible. With your support, we can help even more patients and their families. Our progress here in the North will then also provide insights to help others around the world. 

Thanks to generous individuals and organisations, patients in the North East are benefiting from world-class innovations in blood cancer treatment. Their support for the RVI’s Newcastle based research has already delivered results:

• Recovery rates for Hodgkin’s are among the best in the world, here in the North
   
• A quarter of lymph gland cancer patients are diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease – recently published results are the best for teenagers ever seen in the UK for this group of patients.

The goal of the Research unit is to draw on its internationally acknowledged specialist understanding to extend these successes to other blood cancer patients, who do not currently have the same recovery rates. In particular, it aims to improve recovery rates for older people where cure rates especially for the over sixties, are very poor. The unit is able to draw on the largest lymphoma database in the world, to improve predictions of which treatments are most likely to succeed with individual Patients.

The George Walker Fellowship

With your help over the years in supporting the George Walker Non-Hodgkin’s Appeal, NEPAC is now in a position to half fund a Fellowship in George’s memory.  Dr Venetia Bigley has been appointed to the four year full time post in the Institute of Cellular Medicine, Newcastle University and took up the post on 1 January 2011.  

Venetia graduated in Natural Sciences at Cambridge before converting to medicine at UCL.  After clinical work in various London hospitals, she moved to Newcastle in 2004 to pursue her training in haematology.  She has just completed this, as well as a PhD in Professor Collin’s laboratory within the Academic Haematology group, founded by Professor Proctor.

Her primary clinical interest is in haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (bone marrow transplant) and its use in the treatment of lymphoma, as some 50% of patients who receive a bone marrow transplant now do so to treat lymphoma. In the research field, she is particularly interested in the immune system in haematological disease and specifically a type of cell called a dendritic cell which plays a key role in a healthy immune system and is believed to be involved both in the development of haematological cancers and potentially in their cure.  These cells also have a close link with another immune cell, the B-cell, which is the malignant cell in lymphoma.  She plans to extend recently developed techniques to lymphoma research, including Non-Hodgkins lymphoma, to better understand how the immune system is altered in lymphoma, why bone marrow transplant treatment is proving so successful and how to further improve outcomes.  We wish her every success in her research and look forward to reporting some results in future newsletters.

Venetia would like to extend her sincere thanks to all who have worked so hard to make funding of this post possible.  She is very much looking forward to the next four years in Newcastle and the exciting opportunities this post has created.  A further reason for being thrilled to have developed links with NEPAC is her interest in music, which is also at the heart of NEPAC, as a violinist and singer with local groups.