Sander Lambo

Pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a common type of leukemia that affects blood cells and is diagnosed in roughly 40 Canadian children each year. Although roughly 90 percent of all children respond well to the initial treatment, 20 percent of the children relapse. These relapses are difficult to treat, leading to a poor outcome and a better understanding of how and why these tumors relapse is necessary to better treat those patients.

In this study, single cell sequencing technologies will be used to investigate the matched primary tumor, remission and relapse of AML patients to investigate how epigenetic patterns change over the course of treatment. The aim is to generate and analyse datasets that compare the expression, nucleosome occupancy and methylation of single cells to find out which epigenetic mechanisms are associated to treatment resistance and whether there are subpopulations of treatment resistant cells that can be found.

Using this approach, I intend to obtain a better understanding of changes that occur upon treatment and to find potential new treatment strategies for patients to prevent relapse or to effectively treat patients that are suffering from relapsed disease.

For an up-to-date list of publications by Sander, please see ResearchGate.