Ewing sarcoma is the second most common bone cancer in children, and the treatment of Ewing sarcoma continues to rely on traditional chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation. Unfortunately, children who have Ewing sarcoma that returns after initial therapy or whose disease has spread to other places in their body, a process known as metastasis, often do not survive their disease. Immunotherapies are new approaches to treating cancer using the patient’s own immune system.

Despite various treatment options, cure rates for sarcoma patients continue to be very poor. Many researchers have developed new therapies that harness the immune system to cure cancers; however, most of these treatments (called immunotherapies) are not effective in solid tumors. One of the most promising therapies involves T cells expressing artificial receptors that allow them to recognize and kill cancer cells.

Children with solid tumors have poor overall survival. Further, the treatments used for these diseases are very toxic. One particularly difficult to treat pediatric solid tumor is called neuroblastoma (NB). Children with neuroblastoma are treated with very toxic therapies, and even so, many of them will not be cured. In addition, while large-scale studies have identified the specific proteins that NB cells depend on for growth, these proteins are especially hard to target with traditional drugs. This limits our ability to treat NB effectively.

Pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is the second most common pediatric leukemia, with treatments still based on intense, conventional chemotherapy and overall survival remaining below 70%. Recently, therapeutic research has explored the engineering of a patient’s own immune cells to target unique AML cell surface markers. However to manufacture these therapies immune cells must be collected from patients whose immune system has been depleted by multiple rounds of chemotherapy.