Pediatric center strives to improve treatment for childhood cancer
By Dana Benson
Doctors and researchers at the Texas Children's Cancer Center, a joint program of Baylor and Texas Children's Hospital, are committed in their goal to improve treatment for childhood cancers and to one day find a cure.
Current treatment for many pediatric cancers have reached a plateau, however, so it"s important to look for new ways to treat and find cures for childhood cancer.
The new Pediatric Center for Personal Cancer Genomics and Therapeutics strives to do just that.
The center has been launched at Baylor College of Medicine through a partnership between the Texas Children's Cancer Center and the Human Genome Sequencing Center at BCM.
The goal is to improve the treatment of children with cancer through identification of the specific genetic mutations responsible for their tumors. The center will use state–of–the–art genomic sequencing technologies to comprehensively analyze tumor samples from patients at Texas Children's Cancer Center. Doctors and researchers at the center hope to eventually sequence all new pediatric cancers in the state, cancers affecting 1,000 children per year, in collaboration with investigators at other Texas academic centers.
"We aim to translate the research advances gained from these sequencing studies into clinically useful diagnostic tests and innovative therapies that will improve outcomes for all children with cancer," said Dr. Will Parsons, center director, assistant professor of pediatrics – hematology/oncology at BCM and a pediatric oncologist at Texas Children's Cancer Center.
"Our objective is to deliver the optimal therapy for each patient based on the unique genetic characteristics of both the child and their tumor," said Dr. David Poplack, director of the Texas Children's Cancer Center and professor of pediatrics - hematology/oncology at BCM.
The partnership between Texas Children's Cancer Center and the Human Genome Sequencing Center brings together the clinical and scientific resources and expertise necessary to facilitate groundbreaking studies of the genetics of pediatric cancers.
Translating results to improve care
The collaboration will allow doctors and researchers to directly translate the results of these studies to improved patient care through the development of novel diagnostics and therapeutics, according to Dr. Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at BCM and professor of molecular and human genetics.
The center will build on existing tumor banking and sequencing efforts at Texas Children's Cancer Center as well as at the Texas Cancer Research Biobank, for which Gibbs and his colleagues recently received more than $7 million in funding from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.
Core projects
The new center will focus initially on three core projects:
- The Pediatric Cancer Sequencing Project – sequencing of tumor and blood samples from children with cancer to provide an unprecedented view of the genetic landscape of pediatric cancers.
- Functional genomics – analyzing the effects of mutations on tumor biology and developing tumor models that can be used to test new therapies.
- Clinical cancer genomics and therapeutics – incorporating genomic information into the routine clinical care of children with cancer.
