Sydney team joins global paediatric cancer fight

Sydney's Children's Cancer Institute Australia (CCIA) has joined leading paediatric cancer institutes in the US including St Jude Children's Research Hospital, Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Duke University Medical Centre, and Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Centre to test new cancer drugs for the treatment of childhood cancers.

The consortium has been awarded US$13 million over five years to evaluate cancer drugs in clinically relevant laboratory and animal models of paediatric cancers in order to prioritise drugs for testing in children with cancer. CCIA is likely to receive more than AUD$1.5 million over the next five years for its role in the program.

"Many of the drugs available for use in adults have not been tested in children -- there aren't enough children [for large clinical trials] and it's just not ethical to test these drugs in kids anyway," said Dr Richard Lock, head of CCIA's leukaemia biology program, and CCIA coordinator for the program. "The question is how to prioritise drugs to go into clinical trials for paediatric malignancies."

The program coordinators will meet early in 2005 in the US to discuss the initiative and put together a strategy for the program, Lock said. Following that, drugs will be sent to participants in the program to test in models including the CCIA's models of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and neuroblastoma, both common childhood cancers that between them account for almost two thirds of all childhood cancer deaths.

Other participants in the consortium will evaluate drugs in models for other childhood cancers, including brain tumours, Ewing's sarcoma, osteosarcoma, rhabdomyosarcoma and Wilms' tumour.

Lock said the results of the study would be closely watched by children's cancer groups eager to test promising new drugs in children.

"The results of the studies will extend beyond the development of effective therapies to treat childhood cancers that are currently incurable, to include reducing some of the long-term side-effects of conventional therapy on children who are cured and thus improving their future quality of life," he said.