Cristina Pina studies how blood cells develop in babies and how this process can go wrong and lead to leukemia. She focuses in particular on acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a rare form of childhood cancer that sometimes starts during pregnancy. Each year, about 25 children in the Netherlands are diagnosed with AML, of whom 5 are children under two years old. Cristina aims to identify which blood cells are involved and whether this knowledge can lead to new treatments with fewer side effects.
What goes wrong in leukemia?
Cristina works partly at Sanquin in Amsterdam, where she studies healthy blood formation. At the Máxima Center, she focuses on what goes wrong in leukemia. She works closely with the research group led by Mirjam Belderbos.
‘By better understanding how leukemia develops, we may be able to find new treatments,’ Cristina says. Her research contributes to the mission of the Máxima Center: to cure every child with cancer, with a good quality of life.
Before, Cristina worked in London for years. She recently moved to the Netherlands with her two sons. They already feel at home. ‘Life here is well organized, and the people at Sanquin and the Máxima Center are very welcoming.’
Behavior of blood stem cells
Cristina Pina is an affiliated group leader in the Belderbos group. ‘Mirjam and I share an interest in blood stem cells and in genetic and epigenetic regulation,’ she explains. ‘She mainly looks at stem cell behavior during transplantation, while I study how they contribute to the development of leukemia. Both research lines focus on variability between cells and how that determines their behavior.’
Pina studies how different types of blood cells are formed, how they expand and acquire functionality during development, and what goes wrong when this leads to cancer. In her lab, she uses 3D cell models of embryonic development called gastruloids. These models allow Pina to study the origins of leukemia in greater detail than ever before.
First weeks of development
Gastruloids mimic different aspects of the first few weeks of human embryonic development in time and space. Specifically, they are biased towards making blood, blood vessel-lining, and blood-supporting cells. Pina uses them to understand how different blood cells arise and how errors in these processes can lead to leukemia.
‘We want to unravel the molecular and cellular conditions in which leukemia develops. This helps us identify weak points in the tumor cells. In the future, we hope to target these with precision treatments.’
Pina’s research focuses on epigenetic mechanisms, how gene activity is regulated without changes to the DNA itself. ‘I have long been fascinated by how small differences between cells determine how they develop. Tumor cells exploit this to grow and escape treatment,’ she explains. By gaining a better understanding of these processes, she aims to contribute to more effective therapies with fewer side effects for children with AML.