The University of California San Francisco has been named one of nine academic research medical centers to form the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The network is intended to speed the development of innovative, technically challenging therapies for children with brain malignancies.
The NCI will provide $2 million a year for five years to fund the consortium as the nine centers work together to conceive, develop and carry out pilot studies and early trials of promising new therapies.
While childhood brain tumors are rare, they have surpassed acute lymphoblastic leukemia as the most common cause of cancer deaths among children. And while approximately 60 percent of children with brain tumors survive at least five years, this figure has improved only slightly in the past quarter-century.
However, new treatment possibilities are emerging for childhood brain tumors, said NCI director Richard Klausner, MD. "The Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium will be able to take advantage of these opportunities and by rapidly identifying and evaluating novel treatments, expedite progress toward our ultimate goal, which is improved outcomes for children with brain malignancies," Klausner said.
Neuro-oncologist Michael Prados, MD is principal investigator of the consortium site at UCSF; he also leads the NCI's North American Brain Tumor Consortium, a group of eight centers that for six years has been exploring innovative therapies for adults with brain tumors. "The lesson we've learned from that experience is that we can bring together multidisciplinary teams in institutions of excellence with a common interest in developing strategies to cure brain tumors," Prados said.
"Within this consortium are representatives of all the disciplines that are important in conducting this type of research, all tightly focused and all very committed to the idea that we need to do better in treatment of pediatric brain tumors," Prados said. "Because the new strategies against cancer are very multidisciplinary, they require a relatively small group that can engage in an intense amount of interaction. We can communicate easily and translate ideas quickly into clinical trials. And then we can understand what happens to patients on a biologic basis, and bring questions back to the lab to learn how to do better or how to move forward. The ultimate goal is better understanding and better treatment for children with malignant brain tumors."
Among the potential new treatments for children's brain tumors are drugs targeted at specific proteins in malignant cells; radio surgery techniques; drugs that modulate the immune system to fight tumors; new ways of delivering drugs directly to a tumor, and new approaches to gene therapy.
Evaluation of innovative drugs and technologies like these is difficult for a single institution because children's cancers are rare, and no one cancer center sees enough children with brain tumors to conduct timely clinical studies, said Malcolm Smith, MD, of the NCI's Cancer Therapy Program. Joint studies by the new consortium will make it possible to evaluate new strategies as quickly as they can safely be done, Smith said.
He said that treatments that appear effective in initial studies can then move on to larger, definitive trials such as those conducted through NCI's Clinical Trials Cooperative Groups. UCSF's Children's Cancer Center is a member of one of these networks, the Children's Cancer Group.
At UCSF, key members of the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium are neuro-oncologist Prados and pediatric neuro-oncologist Carolyn Russo, MD; neurosurgeon Mitch Berger, MD, chairman of neurosurgery at UCSF; pediatric neuroradiologist Jim Barkovich, MD; research neuroradiologist Sarah Nelson, PhD; pediatric molecular biologist Mark Israel, MD; molecular biologist Bert Feuerstein, MD, PhD; radiation oncologists Daphne Haas-Kogan, MD and William Wara, MD; neuropathologists Andrew Bollen, MD, DVM and Ken Aldape, MD.
Prados said the group will work closely with Kate Matthay, MD, director of UCSF's Children's Cancer Center, and with Diane Wara, MD, director of the Pediatric Clinical Research Center at UCSF. "One of the reasons that UCSF was chosen for this consortium is that we have the expertise and infrastructure already in place to care for children with cancer. We have a long history of developing clinical research trials both for adults and for children," he said.
Prados said that UCSF's pediatric neuroscientists work closely with their colleagues at Stanford through their combined clinical practice, Lucile Packard Children's' Health Services at UCSF Stanford. He said this means that the consortium will be able to draw on expertise from Stanford colleagues, including pediatric neurosurgeon Steve Huhn, MD; pediatric neuro-oncologist Paul Fisher, MD and pediatric oncologist Gary Dahl, MD.
In addition to UCSF, the other members of the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium are: Baylor College of Medicine, Houston; The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh; Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center, Seattle; Children's National Medical Center, Washington, D.C.; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston; Duke University Medical Center, Durham and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis.
Reporters' Note: for more information on the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium and on children's cancer, contact Caroline McNeil, National Cancer Institute Press Office, 301-496-6641 or visit the NCI website at http://cancertrials.nci.nih.gov