Cancer
Doubling survival rates for high-risk childhood cancer patients
In a world-first, researchers and clinicians have shown that precision medicine or personalised medicine leads to significantly improved outcomes in children with aggressive cancers.
The PRecISion Medicine for Children with Cancer (PRISM) trial observed over 300 children with high-risk childhood cancer for 3 years after receiving a precision-guided therapy. The trial found that just over half of the children who received their personalised therapy achieved complete or partial remission, or had their disease stabilise for at least 6 months.
PRISM was led through the Zero Childhood Cancer Program (ZERO), a world-leading precision medicine collaboration between the Children’s Cancer Institute and the Kids Cancer Centre at the Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick. It involved more than 100 expert scientists and clinicians working together across 9 child cancer centres across Australia...
New and safe way to identify treatment-relevant mutations in children
A team of researchers and clinicians have developed a novel liquid biopsy test to identify treatment-relevant mutations in children with complex arteriovenous malformations (AVMs).
These vascular malformations often respond poorly to standard treatments such as surgery or sclerotherapy, leading to progressive, disabling pathology with lifelong consequences, including chronic pain, dysfunction, and deformity. Unlike traditional open biopsy, which carries a risk of life-threatening bleeding, this innovative approach has been proven to be a safe, effective, and well-tolerated method for genotyping extracranial AVMs.
This advancement was led by Dr. Smadar Kahana-Edwin at the Children’s Cancer Research Unit at Kids Research, who applied her expertise in liquid biopsy technology from cancer research to develop the test. The work was carried out in collaboration with multiple hospital departments at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, including Medical Imaging, Oncology, Clinical Genetics, and Neurosurgery.