Leukemias account for > 3% of all cancers in Australia (~ 4900 cases) and > 4% of cancer deaths (> 2,000 cancer deaths) and leukemias are the most common cancer in people under the age of 24. Of these leukemias ~ 1,500 will be diagnosed as acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). Similar proportionate numbers of AML are reported in the USA where more than 20,000 new cases will be diagnosed in 2021, along with more than 11,000 deaths. AML is a very deadly disease with less than 30% overall long-term survival. Effective treatment of AML is very challenging due to the heterogeneity of the disease. TP53-deficient AML is a particularly aggressive form of the disease. TP53-deficient human AMLs respond poorly to standard therapy with a median survival of 5-9 months. The golden Syrian hamster is an emerging model organism for human diseases. Employing CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene targeting and piggyBac mediated transgenesis our group has created the first genetic models of cancer in hamsters. One of the first hamster cancer models that we created was a knockout of the TP53 gene. TP53 KO hamsters developed a wide range of early onset lethal cancers. 34% of TP53 mutant hamsters developed an aggressive form of invasive AML, becoming moribund as early as 77 days, while another 18% were diagnosed with myeloid hyperplasia to multiple organs. Notably, TP53-deficient mouse and rat models are poor models for AML, thus hamsters provide a unique rodent model to help understand the pathogenesis of TP53-deficient AML in humans, as well as an animal model to test novel AML therapeutics. Finally, it is acknowledged that hamsters cannot be imported for medical research breeding purposes into Australia, which is unfortunate because hamsters are proving to be superior to other permitted rodent models for understanding a range of human diseases. A current example is the wide use of hamsters in SARS-CoV-2 research as hamsters robustly express the ACE-2 receptor while mice do not.