With this in mind, researchers at the Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative are using big data to find a cure… now.
The Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute is raising questions and suggesting intervention strategies for childhood cancer. We’re doing this through children-focused genomics research that’s based on big data. And we are beginning to find answers. Not in 10 years, not in five years — but now.
The statistics around pediatric cancers are overwhelming: Each year, more than 15,000 children and young adults are diagnosed with cancer. That is more than 40 a day. Though the five-year-survival rate for childhood cancers has reached 80 percent, nearly 2,000 children under age 19 still die each year, making cancer the leading killer of children of all diseases. And that’s just in the United States. In 2016, over 300,000 children and young adults were diagnosed worldwide. Every week, nearly 40 children pass away from cancer (https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-in-children/differences-adults-children.html).
Perhaps equally importantly, the survival rate does not address quality of life for children who suffer cancer, the majority of whom are impaired for years or the remainder of their lives due to the after-effects of treatment and disease.
Sadly, most federal and private funding campaigns go towards research for adult cancer.
Below are some interesting differences between adult and pediatric cancer:
- Childhood cancer genomes have few genetic mutations (an order of 10 or fewer, and often mutations that are rare or absent in adults) (Parsons et al., 2010; Pugh, Morozova et al., 2013). By contrast, adult cancer genomes often have many (an order of 100 or more) genetic mutations (The Cancer Genome Atlas)
- Childhood cancers tend to be more aggressive and progress more rapidly. BUT the chance of recovery is high IF given the right intervention (https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-in-children/differences-adults-children.html).
- Childhood cancer is often detected at a later stage: At the time of diagnosis, 80% of children versus only 20% of adults have cancer that has spread to other parts of the body (https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-in-children/differences-adults-children.html).
- Current methods for treating childhood cancer are toxic (e.g. chemotherapy) and particularly dangerous for growing children. Children’s clinical needs often differ from those of mature adults, including their needs for fertility preservation, long-term quality-of-life, mental and physical development.
- Unlike many cancers in adults, childhood cancers are not strongly linked to lifestyle or environmental risk factors.
Fundamentally, cancers in children are biologically different than adults. There are also some cancers that occur in children but never in adults, and vice versa. Progression patterns often differ as well. Hence, what the pediatric oncologists deal with are fundamentally different diseases that need to be treated differently than adult cancer (https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-in-children/differences-adults-children.html).
Treehouse provides the power of large-scale bioinformatics to help children with cancer who fail to respond to standard therapies. By utilizing big data/pan-cancer information, scientists derive clinically meaningful, relative measurements of gene expression. This brings genomic information that otherwise would not have been available to the treating physicians, giving physicians a new direction in cases that might otherwise have seemed hopeless.
Time will tell if some of these new options will translate to cures. Meanwhile, as long as the hard work of data wrangling and data analysis is going on at UC Santa Cruz, there is a bit more hope offered to children and their families facing this terrible disease.
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