ITCC-P4

Because childhood cancer is rare, it receives relatively little scientific attention. Pharma companies have in their possession molecules that hold promise as drugs for use in child cancer patients, but there has been a lack of tools and animal models that can be used to test the molecules’ effects on tumours. ITCC-P4 was conceived to fix this problem###; the project is creating hundreds of different childhood tumours in mouse models in order to study them in detail and, ultimately, use them to test out promising molecules that will lead to new drugs.

‘Our most fervent hope is that the tumour models within the platform represent the heterogeneity across paediatric tumour types. So, let’s say for instance, there are 30 ‘ways’ for a normal cell to essentially go haywire and become a childhood sarcoma. We expect to have in our models those 30 ‘ways’ represented,’ explains project leader Louis Stancato of Eli Lilly.

‘In other words, a patient comes into a clinic, a chunk of his or her tumour is taken and then sequenced, and it’s found that, for example, the cell has gone awry in this particular way. The idea is that we have models like that in our repertoire and we can test molecules against that particular mode of tumorigenesis. We can see which drugs are efficacious, which ones are active. If the child has a certain mutation, well we hope to have that mutation represented in our collection, and hopefully we can identify drugs in the pipeline - or maybe even on the market already - that might target that particular mutation.’

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