Nine cancer centers share $8.9 million grant to improve treatment for neuroblastoma, a cancer that strike...( nhance the effectiveness of current the...),Health

"Our goal is to improve disease-free survival for 90 percent or more of children with neuroblastoma," Seeger said.

Four different laboratory-based projects will investigate the promise of different strategies to stop tumors and their metastases, by targeting drugs to neuroblastoma tumors and by enhancing the drugs' effectiveness at killing even those cancer cells that are resistant to other drugs. Those projects will be led by investigators at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), the Indiana University and the University of Southern California.

The fifth major project of the study, led by Matthay, will translate the most promising of these strategies into small-scale Phase I - II clinical trials, offered to children in the context of the best current treatment for their stage of neuroblastoma. If these steps show that a strategy can be delivered safely, and show evidence that it will be effective, the method will be offered to the nationwide NCI-sponsored children's cancer research networks for large-scale Phase III clinical trials.

Such large-scale nationwide trials, with many institutions working together, are credited with major advances against childhood cancer in the past 25 years. Some children's cancers have high cure rates, and treatments for others have improved. Seeger, Matthay and their colleagues expect that the NANT project will speed the process of offering treatments for this particularly recalcitrant form of cancer -- and may be applicable to other childhood and adult malignancies as well.

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Contact: Janet Basu
jbasu@pubaff.ucsf.edu
415-476-2557
University of California - San Francisco
11-Jun-2000