Weizmann posts leukemia findings after direct hit

During the Iranian missile attacks that rocked Israel in the second half of June, few stories captured the resilience of the Israeli spirit like the one that occurred at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. 

On June 15, Weizmann labs took a direct hit from Iranian ballistic missiles, obliterating years lifetimes worth of irreplaceable scientific research. The Cancer Research Unit was severely impacted, with entire labs destroyed.

Yet despite the mayhem, a joint project led by Professors Liran Shlush and Amos Tanay published a startling breakthrough in leukemia diagnostics, which could fundamentally change the means of diagnosis and treatment of this infamously pernicious form of cancer.

Leukemia, or cancer of the blood, is an aggressive cancer that originates in bone marrow and causes rapid proliferation of malformed blood cells. These cells compromise the body’s ability to fight infection and circulate oxygen. 

Current screenings for leukemia require a bone marrow biopsy, a painful procedure to extract bone marrow and test for leukemic cells. Research by Shlush and Tanay analyzed the proliferation of free-floating stem cells in the bloodstream, an innovative angle of attack as the established consensus is that stem cells are found in bone marrow. 

However, Shlush and Tanay were able to show that these free floaters are found in all adults in low amounts, but their numbers and specific genetic abnormalities could be used to accurately diagnose leukemia in patients, making painful bone marrow biopsies a thing of the past. Additionally, a simple blood test procedure could screen for leukemia non-invasively, well before symptoms begin to express, revolutionizing the ability of the medical community to effectively target and treat the disease. 

“Bone marrow [biopsies] are painful, costly,” Shlush told JNS. “It’s a horrible test. The ability to do it from the blood is a major leap forward.” 

Their paper was published in Nature Medicine just days after their lab was struck in one of the missile attacks. The missile hit at 3 am as Israelis in central Israel huddled in bomb shelters. There were no casualties.

“Some scientists at the Institute lost everything. Complete labs were destroyed. My lab … lost around 25% of our [collected stem cell] samples, which I think is our most precious resource and it’s not replaceable,” Shlush said. “Equipment, you can replace, reagents, you can replace. … These are samples that were either sent to us or we collected ourselves from diseases and projects that we and others have in the Institute, and that’s the major loss.”

“People are giving up part of their labs [for us] to come and work” and the project’s work is not on hold,” he said. “We are conducting a large clinical trial now, which is the continuum of this manuscript, where we will follow patients over time, and we hope that this assay will allow us to predict who is going to progress to leukemia.”

“We hope that bone marrow [biopsies] will be obsolete,” he added.

Clinics around the world are joining their project, as more scientists and physicians catch wind of this startling new method of diagnosis.

“Now we have clinics in the United States, Taiwan and Europe and this will exponentially grow,” Shlush said. “The manuscript is also helpful because physicians are now convinced that this can work.”

“Families that have bone marrow failure syndrome have a higher risk of developing leukemia, so doctors do a bone marrow test on these poor children, once a year,” Shlush explained.

Their research aims to bring their discovery to pediatric doctors as quickly as possible so that children with a predisposition to leukemia can receive much gentler medical care.

Though the return to normalcy in the Weizmann Institute labs will take years, this team of scientists is as committed as ever to the important research they have undertaken. Their story is just one example of the ingenuity and dauntlessness of the Israeli spirit. 

While Israel fought the Iranian enemy, Shlush, Tanay and their team advanced the fight against cancer — and they scored a win.