Funded by the Dick Vitale Pediatric Cancer Research Fund
Only half of children with neuroblastoma that is found to be “high-risk” (HR-NB) live after getting the best known treatments. To change this, we need to know what makes HR-NB grow, and find new targets to attack. The New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) (www.nant.org) is a team of doctors working with patients and/or in labs to find new treatment ideas and test them in children whose tumor didn’t go away after getting the best known treatments. If NANT’s new treatments are safe and make some tumors get smaller, they are then tested in more children to see if the new treatment is better than the best-known treatments. A little blood, bone marrow, and tumor are also taken from patients on NANT treatments to study in labs to see why our new idea did or didn’t work, and how we can make them better. There are 18 NANT hospitals in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. NANT is the only group working only on new/better HR-NB treatments. This grant will support NANT doctors, labs, and the people who work in the NANT office to quickly take new ideas from labs and turn them into treatments being given to children with HR-NB. It also helps us to store patient samples so they can be used to keep finding new and better ideas. Our goal is to find safe treatments that will help more children with HR-NB to live.
