The study, led by the laboratory of Prof. Ari Melnick, Director of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, along with the laboratories of Drs. Wendy Béguelin from the New York University Grossman School of Medicine and Leandro Venturutti from the University of British Columbia, not only identifies the biological reason for this disparity, but points to an existing class of drugs that could specifically protect female patients. The findings are published in the journal Cancer Discovery.

DLBCL affects hundreds of thousands of people worldwide each year. Although outcomes vary widely between patients, sex had never previously been identified as a driver of survival differences in this disease. By analyzing data from nearly 5,000 patients across 14 independent studies, the team found that women whose tumors carry simultaneous faults in two genes called SPEN and NOTCH2, had a more than fourfold higher mortality risk than men with the same mutations.