A team of childhood cancer researchers, known as the Pediatric Cancer Dream Team, were first created in 2013 through collaboration between the charitable organizations Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) and the St. Baldrick’s Foundation. The Dream Team’s funding has just been renewed with an $8 million donation from the St. Baldrick’s Foundation that has been matched by eight other organizations, making the total amount $16 million, reports PR Newswire. This will give the Dream Team the financial support they need to continue their research program into childhood cancers.
Over 10,000 children under the age of 15 in the US are diagnosed with cancer each year. As with all cancers, it is caused by uncontrolled cell growth. However, while cancers in adults are often linked to environmental or lifestyle factors, childhood cancers are typically caused by DNA changes that occur very early in life. The most common forms of childhood cancer are leukemia, which constitutes 30% of all cases, and brain and spinal cord cancers that make up 26% of cases. Survival rates for children with cancer are now much higher than in the past, largely due to significant improvements in treatment options. Approximately 80% of children will survive five years or more after their diagnosis, compared with 58% of adults in their mid seventies. Research into treatments is ongoing, and the recent donation will make a significant contribution continuing it.
The Dream Team is an extremely successful research project made up of over 150 scientists over eight institutions. Their initial grant of $14.5 million from St. Baldrick’s and SU2C funded four years of their work between 2013 and 2017. The team’s research focused on exploring the role that immunotherapy could play in childhood cancers, and why it sometimes works and sometimes fails. Their work was often interdisciplinary, bringing together the fields of genetics and immunotherapy to develop new treatments. During the last four years they published over 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts, conceived sixteen patents, carried out over twenty-five clinical trials, made significant improvements to immunotherapy side-effect management, had many breakthroughs in understanding childhood cancer, and were significantly involved in the development of two ‘living drugs’ designed for leukemia patients and approved by the FDA, amongst other achievements.
The team plans to spend the new donation on research that focuses on childhood cancers that do not respond well to current treatments. They also plan to continue clinical trials, and push forward previous research findings to the next stage of early clinical trials. The exact plans will need to be approved by a scientific committee, and the team will need to demonstrate that they have achieved significant results to continue their funding each year.
