Health Notes

Curing Childhood CANCER

By Connie Mitchell

Childhood cancer of all types remains the leading cause of disease-related death past infancy in children and adolescents, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The metro area, the St. Baldrick’s Foundation (based in Monrovia, California) helps make it easier for qualifying children to enter clinical trials that may offer better outcomes and contribute to researchers’ understanding of childhood cancer’s causes and treatments.

Grant funding from the foundation contributes to the salary of a research nurse who helps enroll children for clinical trials at SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital. A significant proportion of patients enroll in various trials, says Dr. William Ferguson, a pediatric oncologist and division director of The Costas Center at the hospital. Some studies explore the biology of the various diseases to help researchers understand the causes and mechanisms of childhood cancer, while others involve experimental treatments.

“We look at every child when they come in and see if there’s a trial for which they’re eligible, because frequently that provides the most advanced care, and that’s how we learn to make things better,” Ferguson says. Clinicians discuss a trial’s risks and benefits with families to determine if it’s a good fit for the patient. Ferguson adds that he and his colleagues only recommend trials that offer a good potential for improved treatment and outcomes.

Clinical trials form the basis of new discoveries that are moving cancer care forward for children and adults alike. For example, Ferguson points to drug trials that are changing the odds of relapse for children with neuroblastoma, a cancer that usually begins in the adrenal glands and spreads to other organs.

“Neuroblastoma is one of the more common tumors we see in children, and the cure rate with standard therapy is a little bit better than 50 percent,” he says. “When these kids relapse, you can get them back in remission, but it almost always keeps coming back. About eight years ago, a group we were part of started looking at a new drug to see if we could prevent those relapses. And we’ve had very encouraging data.” (The federal Food and Drug Administration is considering that drug for approval.) “It’s something that just in the last few years can offer hope to these patients.”

Ferguson notes that organizations like St. Baldrick’s remain key to providing the overall assistance needed to move research forward. “St. Louis continues to support this cause,” says Traci Johnson, a spokeswoman for the foundation. “This year, the Helen Fitzgerald’s Virtual Shave and Share Event raised nearly $272,000 to support St. Baldrick’s mission to conquer kids’ cancer.”

“When I was a kid, the cure rate for childhood cancer was about 10 percent – now, it’s 80 to 90 percent,” Ferguson adds. “That’s due to testing new treatments and better understanding how cancer cells work, and we continue to make progress.” ln The Costas Center at SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital, 1465 S. Grand Blvd., St. Louis, 314-268-4000, ssmhealth.com

OUT OF THIS WORLD

By Drew Gieseke

Ateam of high-tech Chesterfield high schoolers is taking its talents to the stars.

The Marquette High School rocketry team, known as Astral Orbit, recently submitted a winning proposal in the 2021-22 NASA TechRise Student Challenge, and as a result, the group was given the go-ahead to design and build an experiment that tests the impact of regolith (“lunar dust”) on materials used in spaceflights. In 2023, their project will be sent into space via the SpaceLoft platform from Highlands Ranch, Colorado’s UP Aerospace. Oddly enough, Astral Orbit’s winning proposal was almost an afterthought. “We had a lot of ideas,” says Ben Cook, lead writer on the proposal and now a freshman at Washington University in St. Louis. “The funny thing is that this was kind of our backup proposal.” Astral Orbit consists of approximately 20 students passionate about aerospace, rocket science and engineering. When the competition opened in June 2021, Astral Orbit began developing multiple different ideas, many of which were related to the NASA Artemis program, which seeks to “establish the first long-term presence on the Moon,” according to NASA’s website.

Astral Orbit team members felt that each proposal had a great chance at being selected. But the inspiration behind their winning idea – officially titled “Lunar Regolith Simulant Behavior in Microgravity Environments: A NASA TechRise Proposal” – came from Cook’s self-admitted space history nerdishness.

“Looking back at the Apollo missions, they faced a lot of problems with moon dust,” he says. “And I was looking at the Artemis missions and was thinking, ‘How is this going to happen?’ They’re going to spend months and years on the moon, and we have troubles with days on the moon. So how can we help with the Artemis project?”

The team is already hard at work building their experiment, which comes due in October and which will launch sometime early next year. Their focus involves evaluating regolith, which has a stickiness that earth dust lacks and can cause major issues for everything from space equipment to machinery. Astral Orbit’s project will use simulated lunar dust to test how it affects different materials used on space missions, including the ortho-fabric in spacesuits and other items.

“Down here on earth, when you get dust on your clothing, you can just wipe it off,” says Jason Zhao, a junior and avionics lead on the project. “But regolith has some unique properties, like clumping and stickiness. And a lot of times, it can get into cracks and crevices really well.”

During the experiment, artificial lunar dust will be loaded into a test chamber and evaluated to see how it sticks to various spaceflight materials as it spins in zero gravity, which Cook likens to a washing machine. The experiment will fit inside a small box that’s mounted in the unmanned rocket, where it will collect data once it’s in space.

“Eventually, the experiment will come back to earth,” says Alex Chen, a senior and secondary author of the proposal. “Engineers on the earth will recover the rocket [and] send it back to us so we can look at the data we collected.”

With a deadline approaching, Astral Orbit has its hands full with designing the experiment, and this crew is fired up to be part of the mission ahead. ln