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CL’79

Published on avril 30, 2019

For the past few years, the 1979 Collège Laval (CL79) graduating class has rallied around one of their own, Dr. Guy Sauvageau, to encourage his research work targeting one of the most frequent types of blood cancer in adults: acute myeloid leukemia (AML), of which there are 20,000 new cases a year in North America.

Over the years, Guy Sauvageau’s work has led to major breakthroughs, notably in the discovery of the UM171 molecule, which multiplies cells in a unit of cord blood. This molecule has been the subject of a recently completed clinical trial, the first two phases of which provide great hope for treating AML.

Dr. Sauvageau’s work also led to the identification of mutations and genes playing a key role in AML, the discovery of chemical compounds capable of eliminating leukemic cells in some genetic subgroups with a poor prognosis, and the development of a new AML prognosis marker currently in the implementation phase.

The CL79 graduating class came together to encourage the pursuit of these significant discoveries and lends its support to Dr. Sauvageau and his team.

All of the money raised is donated directly to the project for creating a Chair in blood stem cell chemogenomics. This project, headed by Dr. Sauvageau, would lead to achieving concrete progress for the 360,000 cases diagnosed worldwide in 2018.