Menzies' Senior Research Fellow, Dr Joanne Dickinson and her cancer genetics team received a major boost for their work into blood cancer, with a $91,000 grant from the Leukaemia Foundation early this year.

Menzies' Senior Research Fellow, Dr Joanne Dickinson and her cancer genetics team received a major boost for their work into blood cancer, with a $91,000 grant from the Leukaemia Foundation early this year.

Blood cancer is the fifth most common cancer in Australian men and women, but only lung cancer claims more lives. Around 4,000 people are expected to lose their life to blood cancer this year.

In 2011, around 11,500 Australians are expected to develop leukaemia, lymphoma or myeloma. And while as many as 40,000 people live with one of these forms of blood cancer today, statistically just over half are expected to survive.

Dr Dickinson says that many blood cancers have a genetic basis to them that can be inherited from one generation to the next.

"This can cause these cancers to be more common in some families than others," Dr Dickinson said.

"We are trying to identify some of these inherited risk genes using large families from Tasmania."

"Through the Tasmanian Familial Haematological Malignancies Study we have identified certain families where there is an increase in incidence of blood cancers. We propose this is due to a genetic predisposition that can subsequently give rise to malignancies in any blood cell type," she said.

A recent finding from this study has found that for some families, the age at diagnosis with a blood cancer appears to be occurring at a younger age for each successive generation. These findings were recently published in the prestigious international haematology journal Blood.

"This new funding from the Leukaemia Foundation will enable us to make significant progress with this work, taking advantage of newly available gene technologies. These technologies can give us detailed information about gene function in these families."

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