Thanks to the power of precision medicine, we’re experiencing a revolution in the treatment of cancer, yet progress for children lags behind. Children are not little adults, and the ways that cancers behave in children and respond to therapy are profoundly different. Yet children have been treated for decades with adult therapies that can have negative, lifelong impacts for patients who survive. Over 40 years, only a handful of therapies have been developed specifically for children. The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is changing that through PedAL, a global precision medicine master clinical trial for children with relapsed acute leukemia that will test multiple targeted therapies at up to 200 clinics worldwide. Collaboration is an integral and vital component of discovering treatments and cures, and the Kuni Foundation is supporting this work through a $75,000 grant. Through PedAL, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society seeks to break down silos across sectors, scientific disciplines, institutions and countries. Working together with other collaborators, researchers will identify and validate the underlying drivers of disease and match patients to the most promising targeted therapies based on their unique genetic information.
