Smarter cancer treatments Targeted childhood cancer treatments

Next Generation Precision Medicine program

Rarity is a virtue in some fields. Unfortunately, that’s anything but true when it comes to childhood cancers.

Not only are they often uneconomic for drug companies to pour research dollars into, but tissue samples can be hard to come by.

As Head of the Centre for Cancer Research, Professor Ron Firestein wants to change all that with the VPCC Next Generation Precision Medicine program. The aim is to significantly improve treatment for childhood cancer patients with the greatest unmet clinical need –those diagnosed with brain cancers and solid tumours.

Prof Firestein’s four-pronged approach to the problem includes going beyond genomic sequencing to what’s called multi-omics, which studies the genome, transcriptome, epigenome and proteome of cancer cells.

Another crucial aspect of this program is the creation of the Childhood Cancer Model Atlas (CCMA) – a tissue bank where samples of actual cancers can be stored and reproduced, to be analysed and tested against potential therapies.

The CCMA is also the largest collection of high-risk paediatric solid tumour cell lines in the world, and for Prof Firestein and cancer researchers everywhere, it is a goldmine.

The CCMA also includes a searchable data portal to foster the collaborative and hypothesis-driven research needed to catalyse clinical translation.