Catalan researchers awarded €8.3M in EU funds to study leukemia

The European Research Council (ERC) awarded four teams of investigators in Catalonia a grant of €8.3 millions to study chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), the most common leukemia in adults in western countries.

The project, called BCLL@las and launched in 2009, includes two groups from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and two others from the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS).

The aim of the project is to understand the genomic and epigenomic characteristics of the CLL by analyzing individual cells—something that could help predict the development of the disease in each patient.

The director of CRG’s National Centre for Genomic Analysis, Ivo Gut, said that the results of the study could lead to new discoveries that shed some light on the origins of cancer and its development.

Cancer starts when cells start to grow out of control. CLL is a type of cancer that starts in cells that become certain white blood cells (called lymphocytes) in bone marrow. Although the leukemia cells start in the bone marrow, they eventually go into the blood.

The ERC is a public body for funding of scientific research conducted within the European Union. It is a flagship component of Horizon 2020, the EU's Research Framework Programme for 2014 to 2020.