Charles Roberts, Cancer Center Director and Executive Vice – President at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, shared St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital‘s post on LinkedIn, adding:
“Cytotoxic chemotherapy has saved many lives, but damages healthy tissue and can lead to significant long – term challenges for survivors. I am excited for what the future holds with the emergence of new technologies and therapeutic approaches. We are poised to transition from an era of treatments to an era of cures for children with cancer.”
Quoting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital‘s post:
“Childhood cancers are biologically distinct from adult cancers. Many arise not from decades of accumulated mutations but from disruptions in normal developmental programs. This fundamental difference influences how researchers approach discovery, diagnosis and treatment.
‘In children, the mutational burden is much lower,’
said Charles Roberts, MD, PhD, St. Jude Comprehensive Cancer Center director.
‘Their tumors form because a small number of mutations cause normal development to go off track.’
Since more than half of the mutations driving childhood cancers do not appear in adult cancers, therapies originally created for adult diseases often provide limited benefit for pediatric patients. Understanding pediatric biology is key to developing effective, durable treatments.
Work led by Roberts demonstrates how studying childhood cancers can generate insights that extend across age groups. Research on the SWI/SNF chromatin remodeling complex helped inform the development of an FDA approved EZH2 inhibitor now used in cancers affecting both children and adults.
Roberts’ approach to pediatric cancer research is helping bring forth new treatment strategies rooted in pediatric biology, including targeted protein degradation, CAR T – cell therapy, RNA based therapeutics and epigenetic reprogramming. These advances show the potential of approaches designed specifically around the mechanisms driving childhood tumors.
St. Jude continues to invest in areas that traditional drug development models often overlook. By supporting target validation, preclinical development and early phase clinical research, the institution helps ensure that discoveries grounded in pediatric biology have a clear path to becoming therapies for children with cancer. ”
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