Primary Children's Medical Center Archives

2014

Scholar Grant

Dr. Joshua Schiffman

Salt Lake City, UT

In the past decade, tremendous progress has been made in our understanding of genetic changes in tumors and our ability to analyze these alterations. Unfortunately, most children who relapse from cancer will ultimately die from their disease. Using new genomic technologies, oncologists have identified genetic alterations in tumors that respond to targeted therapies. Many institutions have now implemented genomic profiling in tumors from adults, and sometimes children, too. The ability to accurately profile tumors for DNA alterations holds great promise for the treatment of relapsed cancer. However, like many new cancer approaches, genomic profiling is still in its clinical infancy and has not yet been thoroughly studied to understand its benefit. Many studies have proven the feasibility to analyze patient tumors, but few studies have examined the clinical value or financial benefit. Primary Children’s Hospital (PCH) at the University of Utah is in a unique position to answer these important questions about genomic profiling. We have a strong collaboration with Huntsman Cancer Institute and ARUP Laboratories that gives us immediate access to the genomic technologies needed to analyze and interpret relapsed tumors from the pediatric patients treated at PCH. Our children’s hospital offers several clinical trials for relapse, and includes a large catchment area of all Utah and the five surrounding states in the Intermountain West. Moreover, our electronic medical records include financial cost and we have begun to analyze this data with health economists. For this study, we will create a clinical pipeline for tumor profiling and evaluation of its utility. Specifically, we will examine the ability of genomic profiling to match patients to the most appropriate therapy, the benefit of profiling on clinical outcome, and the financial value of this approach. This will allow us to determine the clinical utility of genomic profiling in relapsed pediatric cancer.