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Clinician Scientists receive funding from the Brigitte and Dr. Konstanze Wegener Foundation
Dr. med. Livius Penter, internist, and Dr. med. Jana Ihlow, pathologist, are fellows in the Clinician Scientist Program researching how allogeneic stem cell transplants and immunotherapeutic strategies can be used to treat acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). The Brigitte and Dr. Konstanze Wegener Foundation is now funding their joint project beginning in July 2025 with 175,000 euros, with which they want to elucidate the immune cell landscape in extramedullary AML.
In extramedullary AML (eAML), leukemia cells grow outside the bone marrow. Because this disease is rare, there is currently no established therapy. As a result, patients regularly suffer from a relapse of the disease, even after intensive treatment. Dr. Penter and Dr. Ilhow suspect that immune mechanisms could play a role in this, as eAML does not only occur frequently after an allogeneic stem cell transplant. There are also cases in which the disease regressed after treatment with the immune checkpoint inhibitor ipilimumab.
With the funding, the clinician scientists want to take advantage of technical innovations such as spatial transcriptomics, a method in which gene expression within a tissue can be spatially analyzed, and multiplex immunofluorescence, which allows researchers to simultaneously visualize several biomarkers in a sample in color. In this way, they hope to better understand which factors lead to leukemia cells being able to grow outside the bone marrow and which immune escape mechanisms play a role in this, i.e. which ways tumor cells find to evade detection by the immune system.
Statements by the Clinician Scientists
Livius Penter: "During my postdoc with Cathy Wu at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, I have already worked intensively on eAML and found out that T cells in the bone marrow and extramedullary leukemia manifestations are fundamentally different. Together with Jana and my postdoc Mischa Selig, we now want to understand these differences even more precisely and also clarify the spatial relationship between immune and leukemia cells. In the long term, I hope to be able to derive approaches from this that we can use to develop new immunotherapies for eAML."
Jana Ihlow: "The collaboration with Livius' group brings together our complementary expertise, from which we both benefit greatly. Extramedullary AML is not only a major challenge for clinicians. Due to its diverse manifestations, it also regularly causes difficulties in histopathological diagnosis. I am delighted that we can now use our extensive sample archive to systematically research this disease."