Solving Kids' Cancer - every kid deserves to grow up

Patient-specific Therapeutic Development for Neuroblastoma

In 2009 Solving Kids’ Cancer launched the Neuroblastoma Drug Discovery Program in partnership with the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto. The program manages a large-scale screening of thousands of available agents against a recently discovered population of important cancer cells in neuroblastoma. These new cells, neuroblastoma tumor-initiating cells (or cancer stem cells), are an important discovery for developing new therapies to treat difficult cancers, in this case neuroblastoma.

The Neuroblastoma Drug Discovery Program has effectively screened to-date five highly promising therapeutic agents that have never yet been used to treat children with cancer.  Dr. David Kaplan, a pioneering leader in the discovery of cancer stem cells, is now focused on bringing these promising agents into the clinic for children with neuroblastoma beginning with an important translational project.

This project, Patient-specific Therapeutic Development for Neuroblastoma, initiates a patient-specific therapeutic treatment to children and will validate a hypothesis that patient-specific therapies targeting cancer stem cells in children with neuroblastoma can be both safe and highly effective. This project in children’s cancer shifts research from a one-size-fits-all treatment to personalized medicine. The five promising agents successfully screened from The Neuroblastoma Drug Discovery Program will be tested within in vivo models that match the diverse types and locations of children’s own neuroblastoma to test the effectiveness of killing these resistant cancer cells. The goal is to create a platform for three new patient-specific nearterm clinical trials.  This is an unprecedented goal of three completely new treatments for children with complex cancers.