Intractable Pediatric Cancers Dream Team - Stand Up To Cancer

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St. Baldrick’s Foundation–SU2C Pediatric Cancer Dream Team: Immunogenomics to Create New Therapies for High-Risk Childhood Cancers

Grant Term: December 2017 – November 2021

The St. Baldrick’s Foundation–SU2C Pediatric Cancer Dream Team is a collaboration among pediatric cancer researchers in the largely disparate disciplines of cancer genomics and immunotherapeutics. The team focuses on developing new, targeted immunotherapeutics―ways to engage the body’s own immune system in the fight against childhood cancers that are the most difficult to cure. This team’s work builds on research done by the first
SU2C–St. Baldrick’s Pediatric Cancer Dream Team, which was initially funded in July 2013.

ABOUT THIS TEAM’S RESEARCH

Medicine needs new classes of therapeutics to improve survival of children with cancer and decrease the potentially life-altering physical, emotional, and financial costs of current therapies. The team uses new technologies in the fields of cancer genomics, epigenetics (the study of mechanisms that alter gene expression), and proteomics (research into proteins and their functions) to discover and validate new targets for immunotherapy.

The team is building new antibodies, antibody–drug combinations, and CAR T cells (tumor-seeking killer cells) to attack these targets. It is developing innovative new immunotherapies, discovering basic mechanisms of effectiveness (or lack thereof) in both antibody and cellular engineering, and devising novel methods to monitor clinical effectiveness and toxicity.

Team members previously opened more than 20 clinical trials and treated nearly 700 pediatric patients with cancers that have resisted treatment. Their work has demonstrated the potency of immunotherapy against acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), and the scientists have also made progress against childhood solid cancers.

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