Expanding Access to New Agents for Cancer Treatment.
The majority of children diagnosed with cancer in the US are cured with modern, intensive treatment strategies. However despite this good outcome for most patients, a proportion will do very poorly, and have little hope for a cure. As such, novel approaches to therapy and new drugs are clearly needed for these patients. There has been an explosion in the research and development of treatments for cancer in recent years, but unfortunately, moving these agents to pediatric patients has been slow. Similarly, when a patient and family are faced with the need for new therapies because a child has relapsed, it places an added burden on them to have to travel, sometimes thousands of miles, to get access to promising treatment.
The Experimental Therapeutics Program at The Children’s Hospital Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders in Denver was started in 2002, with the specific goal to bring the most promising therapies to children with advanced cancers for which there are few good treatment options. We have clinical and a laboratory components, and joins the strengths of the NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Colorado Cancer Center, with the absolute dedication to the comprehensive care of children with cancer at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Since its inception, the ETP has drawn patients from 40 states and 19 foreign countries for consultation and treatment, and we typically have more than a dozen open trials at any given time to offer patients and families. Maintaining a low staff to patient ratio to facilitate patient access to this program is critical to its success.
Update
Lia Gore received a 2007 Program Infastructure Grant.
