New hope for children at risk of cancer
Children with a high risk form of the childhood cancer neuroblastoma are set to benefit from a new international clinical trial – funded by Cancer Research UK - which uses immunotherapy to help prevent the disease from coming back.
The phase III trial, which opens in the UK this month, builds on early promising results from a US study, which found that treatment with immunotherapy – boosting the immune system to fight the disease - improved the chances of survival from the disease.
Around 100 children are diagnosed with neuroblastoma every year in the UK, usually under the age of five. Overall, six out of ten children are successfully treated, but for children with advanced forms of the cancer it is very difficult to treat successfully.
Doctors estimate that around 40 children per year would be eligible for and potentially benefit from this new treatment. This immunotherapy treatment hunts down neuroblastoma cells that have survived conventional treatment by recognising specific molecules on their surface called GD2 antigens.
After sticking to the neuroblastoma cells the antibodies then recruit the body’s immune defences to attack and destroy neuroblastoma cells, reducing the chance of the disease coming back.
The trial, which is part of a larger European one, will run in all 20 childhood cancer clinical trial centres across the UK and it will recruit 160 children over the next four years.
Dr Penelope Brock, a consultant paediatric oncologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital, who will lead the trial, said: “The launch of this trial is really fantastic news for our patients. Early results from the US trial found that children who received the immunotherapy treatment had less chance of the disease coming back two years later, compared with the patients who did not receive the immunotherapy. We need to build on these results and devise better immunotherapy approaches that improve survival further.”
Overall, six out of ten children are successfully treated, but for children with advanced forms of the cancer it is very difficult to treat successfully.Bridges To Recovery