Burkitt Lymphoma (BL) patients would benefit from improved treatment modalities. Current chemotherapy is ineffective in approximately 20% of cases and is associated with therapy-induced toxicity and death. BL patients over 70 years of age are ineligible for potentially curative therapy because of the toxicity. Young individuals exposed to the intensive regimens face the real possibility of secondary malignancies years later. Finally, African children with endemic BL in general do not receive these curative chemotherapy regimens due to the lack of hospital support for the management of post-treatment infections, and consequently most will die of their disease. The overall goal of the project are, (not all of them funded by the YT: to develop a comprehensive database of molecular changes in Burkitt Lymphoma (BL)and make the data available to the scientific community. This will be accomplished by comprehensive molecular characterization of the DNA and RNA from BL cases, analysis of the results to identify molecular alterations (mutations or other changes), and define affected pathways, correlations between genotype and phenotype and others Determine the frequency of these alterations in another cohort. BLGSP gets input from an expert group of clinicians and cancer researchers including NCI?s Drs. Staudt, Wilson and Jaffe, Dr. Noy from MSKCC, Dr. Dalla-Favera from CU and John Chan from UNMC.
