Children’s Hospitals Team Up to Link Patients to Clinical Trials

Michigan Medicine’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital recently announced that it has joined the top children’s hospitals from the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe to accelerate access to promising clinical trials for children with high-risk brain tumors. 

The collaboration includes more than 225 pediatric brain tumor specialists and 16 clinical trials through the Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC). It allows sites to share research data in real-time and ensure patients get quicker access to clinical trials. 

Children with high-risk brain tumors who don’t respond to standard therapy rely on clinical trials to access alternative treatments and therapies. This collaboration provides the first PNOC site in Michigan, extending access to care for current and future trials to patients. 

“Being a PNOC member puts our program in one of the most exciting inner circles of brain tumor research,” explained Carl Koschmann, MD, pediatric oncologist and site co-principal investigator with PNOC. “Children from Michigan with high-risk, incurable brain tumors now have access to some of the most promising clinical trials in the world. We can push boundaries in an efficient, rapid, and collaborative way to seek breakthroughs.” 

PNOC is centralized in San Francisco and Zurich. Experts part of the organization are versed in various types of tumors and understand the different treatments that may be needed. PNOC trials are based on precision medicine and immunotherapy and tailor treatment.

The clinical data is deposited into a central PNOC database which ensures access to researchers both inside and outside of PNOC. 

Children’s hospitals and academic centers must have experience and research in high-risk pediatric brain tumors, as well as evidence of infrastructure that can carry out complex early phase clinical trials in the patient population to qualify for PNOC, the announcement emphasized. 

Over the last five years, the University of Michigan’s pediatric brain tumor program has seen “unprecedented growth.” This led to the launch of the Chad Carr Pediatric Brain Tumor Center, which has seen patient referrals triple over the past two years. 

The center’s growth is a large reason it was chosen for the PNOC partnership. 

Koschmann voiced that this milestone is huge for the center to validate previous efforts already put in by the team. 

“Our program now meets all of the requirements, and even more exciting, our investigators are positioned to be in a leadership role in the number of international multi-site trials in the coming years,” Koschmann said. 

Koschmann and his team anticipate the global network to accelerate the translation of discoveries in the lab to the patient’s bedside. Overall, being able to get pediatric patients into these clinical trials and share that information around the world in real-time will support precision medicine efforts to cure cancer in high-risk patients. This can be a challenge because researchers need a certain number of patients to test alternative therapies.

“We are very proud of the folks working on building our program, and the people from around Michigan and beyond who have believed and supported the Chad Carr Pediatric Brain Tumor Center… the sky is the limit for where we can take this center from here,” Koschmann concluded.