Solving Kids' Cancer - every kid deserves to grow up

Work | Tumor Initiating Cells

Neuroblastoma Drug Discovery Program

SKC has created the Neuroblastoma Drug Discovery Program in partnership with the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto, Canada.  SickKids pioneered the discovery of cancer stem cells and continues to be the leading institution in using this breakthrough research to provide novel approaches to cancer therapy.

In this program, researchers test enriched populations of tumor-initiating cells (or cancer stem cells), which are thought to be responsible for resistance to chemotherapy and recurrence of neuroblastoma.  The cells are used to screen existing and potential new therapies in the pre-clinical stage.  The use of tumor-initiating cells in evaluating potential agents is an important breakthrough as they provide a newly discovered target of vulnerability and can help solve the puzzle of tumor resistance to standard chemotherapy treatment and of cancer recurrence or relapse.  Traditional models that test with older neuroblastoma cell-lines that may not be representative of actual patient cancer cells, but through the NDDP, enriched cell populations can provide researchers with more viable results.

To date, pre-clinical testing through the NDDP has identified anti-cancer properties in drugs used for malaria, bacterial infections, heart conditions and organ rejection. In animal studies, several of these drugs have prevented the growth of neuroblastoma, and one, rapamycin, has already been administered to children.

The Neuroblastoma Drug Discovery Program is an extremely important aspect of many of SKC’s therapeutic development projects.  It will act as a centralized hub or platform for screening and evaluating all compounds that we pursue in therapeutic development around the world.

A goal of this program is to obtain tumor cells from every child with neuroblastoma and test them for sensitivity to commonly used compounds, in order to develop patient-specific therapies against this childhood cancer.