Pursuing new treatments for Neuroblastoma children

Dear Global Giving Donors and Followers,

During the summer, I had the amazing opportunity to attend the Advances in Neuroblastoma Research Congress, a biannual international conference, where the most cutting-edge neuroblastoma (NBL) research is presented. I was excited to be surrounded by leading experts in the field.

I was thrilled to present my recent research in the Translational Medicine section of the conference. I discussed using functional genomics to identify novel therapeutic targets for retinoic acid combinations in NBL cell lines. We identified new genetic targets, and corresponding drugs, that could increase the efficacy of retinoic acid. The combination of these targeted drugs and retinoic acid could improve the overall survival of NBL patients by decreasing recurrences.

Our next step will be to test these new drug combinations in patient derived NBL cells to prove that they can reduce tumor growth. However, acquiring NBL cells from patients can be an invasive procedure. This is often a bottleneck in testing drugs in culture. At the conference, I learned about potential strategies to address this problem. We could use less invasive procedures, such as “liquid biopsies”, to derive circulating cancer cells from blood samples.

We also plan to test the drug combinations in mice carrying NBL tumors. We will use the mice to track the potential toxicity of these drugs in a living organism. All of the experiments will be done at an institute accredited with the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs), an organization that is centrally important in applying laws about animal research in the United States.

Overall, the validation of new combination treatments for NBL in vivo will help us build the case to move our genomic targets into clinical trials.

Your donation will make these steps toward a cure for neuroblastoma possible!

Thank you for your continued support,

Your Cure First Research Fellow