Publications by authors named "Patricia Garrido Castro"

KMT2A-rearranged acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is characterized by deregulation of the epigenome and shows susceptibility towards histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibition. Most broad-spectrum HDAC inhibitors simultaneously target multiple human HDAC isoforms. Consequently, they often induce toxicity and especially in combination with other therapeutic agents.

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Doxorubicin (doxo) remains the standard of care for patients with advanced soft tissue sarcoma (STS), even though response rates to doxo are only around 14% to 18%. We evaluated enapotamab vedotin (EnaV), an AXL-specific antibody-drug conjugate (ADC), in a panel of STS patient-derived xenografts (PDX). Eight models representing multiple STS subtypes were selected from our STS PDX platform (n = 45) by AXL immunostaining on archived passages.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Researchers used a drug-repurposing strategy to test 4,191 FDA-approved compounds on KMT2A-rearranged infant ALL samples to find effective treatments with lower toxicity to non-leukemic bone marrow.
  • * The study identified several drug classes that activate p53 signaling, which is crucial for inducing cell death in leukemia cells, suggesting drug-induced p53 activation could be key for effective treatment strategies.
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  • Infants with MLL-rearranged infant acute lymphoblastic leukemia (MLL-r iALL) face aggressive treatment with low survival rates of 30-40%, and while many initially respond to therapy, two-thirds experience relapse during treatment.
  • Recent research utilized single-cell RNA sequencing to analyze the effect of the glucocorticoid drug prednisone on leukemic cells, allowing for the classification of these cells as either resistant or sensitive to treatment.
  • This study reveals that cells with a high risk of relapse exhibit characteristics such as basal glucocorticoid response, smaller size, and a marker of stemness, aiding in better risk prediction and understanding of therapy-resistant subpopulations at diagnosis.
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Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in infants (<1 year of age) remains one of the most aggressive types of childhood hematologic malignancy. The majority (~80%) of infant ALL cases are characterized by chromosomal translocations involving the (or ) gene, which confer highly dismal prognoses on current combination chemotherapeutic regimens. Hence, more adequate therapeutic strategies are urgently needed.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Pediatric MLL-rearranged acute myeloid leukemia (AML) has poor outcomes mainly due to relapse and drug resistance, necessitating new treatment options.
  • - Researchers used a drug-repositioning strategy to screen over 4,000 FDA-approved compounds, discovering that pyrvinium pamoate effectively eliminates MLL-rearranged AML cells at concentrations below 1000 nM.
  • - Pyrvinium shows a selective decrease in viability for leukemia cells compared to non-leukemic cells and may work by inhibiting mitochondrial respiration, making it a promising candidate for further studies in treating MLL-rearranged AML.
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Although immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) has shown remarkable clinical benefit in a subset of patients with melanoma and lung cancer, most patients experience no durable benefit. The receptor tyrosine kinase AXL is commonly implicated in therapy resistance and may serve as a marker for therapy-refractory tumors, for example in melanoma, as we previously demonstrated. Here, we show that enapotamab vedotin (EnaV), an antibody-drug conjugate targeting AXL, effectively targets tumors that display insensitivity to immunotherapy or tumor-specific T cells in several melanoma and lung cancer models.

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-rearranged acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) represents a highly aggressive ALL subtype, characterized by aberrant DNA methylation patterns. DNA methyltransferase inhibitors, such as decitabine have previously been demonstrated to be effective in eradicating -rearranged ALL cells in vitro. Here, we assessed the in vivo anti-leukemic potential of low-dose DNA methyltransferase inhibitor decitabine using a xenograft mouse model of human -rearranged ALL.

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-rearranged acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) occurring in infants is a rare but very aggressive leukemia, typically associated with a dismal prognosis. Despite the development of specific therapeutic protocols, infant patients with -rearranged ALL still suffer from a low cure rate. At present, novel therapeutic approaches are urgently needed.

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Introduction: MLL-rearranged acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in infants (<1 year) is characterized by high relapse rates and a dismal prognosis. To facilitate the discovery of novel therapeutic targets, we here searched for genes directly influenced by the repression of various MLL fusions.

Methods: For this, we performed gene expression profiling after siRNA-mediated repression of MLL-AF4, MLL-ENL, and AF4-MLL in MLL-rearranged ALL cell line models.

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Aim Of The Study: Resistance to glucocorticoids (GCs) remains a major problem in the treatment of infants with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) carrying Mixed Lineage Leukaemia (MLL) translocations. Despite intensive research, the mechanism(s) underlying GC resistance remain poorly understood. Recent studies suggested an important role for the pro-survival BCL-2 family member MCL1 in GC resistance in MLL-rearranged ALL.

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