Hi there! For the coming weeks, our blog will be dedicated to our Young SIOP Award winners!
Please meet Lieke van Zogchel, YI from the Netherlands, in her own words.
My name is Lieke van Zogchel, and I am a PhD candidate at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric
Oncology in Utrecht and Sanquin Research, University of Amsterdam. I currently also work as a
medical doctor in the pediatric department in the Jeroen Bosch Hospital and will soon start my
residency in pediatrics. My PhD project is supervised by Dr. Godelieve A.M. Tytgat and prof. dr. C.
Ellen van der Schoot and focusses on liquid biopsies in patients with solid tumors.
Despite intensive treatment, survival of patients with high risk neuroblastoma remains
disappointingly low. With the current clinically used techniques to assess treatment response, we are
not able to identify the majority of patients at risk for recurrence.
Liquid biopsies (e.g. bone marrow or blood) are minimally invasive alternatives to detect (circulating)
tumor derived DNA or RNA. With techniques as RNA- or DNA-based qPCR or droplet digital PCR we
investigate the use of bone marrow or blood samples at diagnosis or during treatment, for tumor
diagnosis, staging or risk group allocation. Our group previously described a panel of mRNA markers
(JCO 2008, Clin Chem 2009) that sensitively detects neuroblastoma mRNA in the bone marrow of
patients at diagnosis and during treatment. We investigated in a large cohort of Dutch and German
patients, in collaboration with the pediatric oncology department in Cologne, the use of these mRNA
markers for minimal residual disease detection and prognostic relevance. In this study we show a
strong association between bone marrow infiltration at different timepoints during therapy, and
event-free and overall survival. At the end of induction therapy, bone marrow infiltration, measured
by mRNA qPCR, identifies patients at risk for relapse.
We are honored that the SIOP scientific board has rewarded this study with a SIOP Young
Investigator Award 2022.
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