Olivia Mason knows all about the important work being done at a Halifax laboratory run by pediatric hematologist oncologist Dr. Jason Berman. The 17-year-old was one of Dr. Berman’s patients when she was diagnosed with cancer six years ago.

“I was starting to just feel very tired,” she recalls. “I swam and my times were getting slower and the week before I started getting really dizzy and I stopped eating and I actually stopped being able to walk.”

Mason had acute myeloid leukemia, or AML.

Dr. Berman says AML is one of the harder to treat leukemias in children. His lab uses zebrafish to study the disease. He says the tropical fish are actually genetically very similar to humans.

“That allows us to manipulate their genome by putting human cancer genes, including human AML leukemia genes, into the fish and can make fish models that actually then end up developing leukemia in the fish,” Dr. Berman tells CTV News.

The goal is to use the fish models to develop new and better treatments for the disease.

Dr. Berman says tremendous advances have been made for other childhood cancer therapies, but not AML.

“We treat the disease with very aggressive chemotherapy and in spite of that, in many cases, the disease comes back and when the disease comes back, it’s very difficult to treat,” he says.

This course of treatment can lead to many negative side effects.

Mason underwent five rounds of chemotherapy and numerous blood transfusions during her six month hospital stay.

“I lost 30 per cent of my body weight because of the chemotherapy,” she says. “Within minutes of receiving the chemo I would be throwing up. I couldn’t eat the entire time I was here. I developed numerous infections.”

Dr. Berman says his lab’s work shows real promise.

“We’ve identified some new genetic pathways and identified some drugs that are currently on the market that haven’t been used in this type of leukemia before that may be able to improve the outcome with less side effects.”

“You want your treatment to make you feel better, and mine, it makes me feel better now, but at the time I felt awful, so no one should have to do that,” adds Mason.

Mason calls Dr. Berman’s research incredible and hopes it will save other patients from going through ordeals like she did.