Restoring hope

For Moritz Zgraggen*, a 45-year-old triathlete in the prime of his life, the news that his nosebleeds and sudden loss of performance were symptoms of a life-threatening disease came as a shock. His blood count showed that he had acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a rare cancer of the blood contracted by around 400 people a year in Switzerland. Although AML tends to affect older individuals, it can strike anyone. In this form of cancer, the leukemia cells crowd out healthy blood cells and interfere with the development of new blood cells in the bone marrow. If not treated it can be fatal.

Moritz Zgraggen immediately started treatment: chemotherapy, followed by a transplant of blood stem cells from a suitable donor to also eliminate the last remaining cancer cells. This is the only hope of a cure for those affected. “The chemo works for 85 percent of patients,” explains Alexandre Theocharides, attending physician at the University Hospital Zurich (USZ) Department of Medical Oncology and Haematology. But around 15 percent fail to respond, which also rules out a transplant. The prognosis for these people is bleak. There’s a lack of effective drugs, also for patients who have already received treatment but suffer a relapse – around half of them.

Alexandre Theocharides is trying to find new drugs for these people. He is working with Berend Snijder, a systems biologist at ETH Zurich who has developed a method called pharmacoscopy that uses fully-automated, state-of-the art microscopy to investigate the effect of more than a hundred potential drugs on leukemia cells simultaneously. “With so many parameters and patient samples it would be impossible to do a manual analysis,” says Theocharides.

The researchers will also be looking for immunotherapies, which have so far seen little use in the treatment of acute leukemia. Alexandre Theocharides’s work is supported by a donation from the Iten Kohaut Stiftung to the USZ Foundation. “I hope to be able to find new drugs, and that in future we at USZ will be able to determine the most promising therapy for each patient on an individual basis,” says Theocharides. This way he could restore hope to those who can’t be helped by chemotherapy or who suffer a relapse.

Moritz Zgraggen was fortunate: he responded to the chemotherapy and stem cell transplant. Now, five years, on, he is free of cancer.

*anonymized