Acute myeloid leukemia, measurable residual disease, clonal evolution, drug resistance

• Improving the assessment of MRD and the implementation of MRD as a prognostic factor to support and improve clinical decision making.
• The development of novel therapeutic strategies that overrule drug resistance to target MRD and reduce relapse risks in Leukemia patients
• Increasing knowledge on leukemia heterogeneity and clonal evolution during therapy

Jacqueline Cloos is Full Professor Translational Hematology, with a specialized focus on acute leukemia, at the Amsterdam UMC. Her research aims to improve clinical diagnostics, treatment strategies, and patient outcome in acute leukemia. To achieve this, her research focuses on residual leukemia cells that remain after chemotherapy: minimal residual disease (MRD). MRD is the major cause of relapse in cancer and leukemia. MRD is evaluated in her research group using flow cytometry and is a robust prognostic factor for relapse risk, guides personalized therapy and important for monitoring disease to assess early signs of recurring leukemia in individual patients. Improvements on MRD and implementation of MRD as an early clinical endpoint are continuous subjects of research by a team of 10 research technicians and several PhD students. MRD assessments may be hampered by the intra-tumor heterogeneity of AML, this and concurrent clonal evolution during therapy are also studied within the group of Prof. Cloos. With the aim to target MRD and reduce the risk of relapse for the individual patient, drug resistance against standard chemotherapy and novel treatment strategies such as proteasome inhibitors and splicing modulators are also studied.

Background

Cloos graduated from VU University, Amsterdam in 1991 and obtained her PhD 5 years later at the Department of the VU University Medical Center at the Department of Otolaryngology. After being the research coordinator at the Department of Pediatric Oncology, she is currently appointed as a full Professor Translational Hematology in particular Acute Leukemia at the Amsterdam UMC. She is PI on several research projects involving drug resistance in acute leukemia, MRD and stem cell monitoring and clonal evolution in AML. As a co-PI she has ongoing collaborations within and outside the institute to investigate the role of mRNA splicing, phosphoproteomics and in (multi-) drug resistance mechanisms.

Activities

• Full professor translational hematology at the Amsterdam UMC
• Vice-chair European Leukemia Net AML MRD working party https://eln-david.org/
• Chair Dutch AML MRD working party