13 Nov 2023 Research

This year’s Olive Boles Innovation Award winner announced

Dr Kevin Rattigan, University of Glasgow, has been selected as this year’s Olive Boles Innovation Award winner – an accolade given to one Leukaemia UK John Goldman Fellow each year. The award recognises an innovative, higher risk idea that could contribute significantly to our understanding of leukaemia.

Dr Rattigan’s pioneering research sets out to test a potential new treatment for acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) – a type of leukaemia with a devastatingly low survival rate in the UK of around 13.6% after five years.

Dr Rattigan has already revealed a checklist of nutrients that AML needs to survive and has now developed a protein that can lower levels of one of these key nutrients. As part of his fellowship, Dr Rattigan will now test if his developed protein could be a potential new treatment option to slow or stop leukaemia and if so, whether it could be combined with existing AML treatments to make them more effective.

This research focuses specifically on AML, but if successful, could also have benefits for other blood cancers and beyond in the future.

Dr Rattigan said ‘I am honoured to be awarded both the Leukaemia UK John Goldman Fellowship and Olive Boles Innovation Award. This funding from Leukaemia UK means so much to me as it supports me in developing new treatments for AML patients. I am very grateful that my work is to be recognised by an award named after the inspirational Olive Boles who created the John Goldman fellowship. Thank you to all the charity’s donors whose generosity makes this research possible.’