Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) https://www.chop.edu has helped launch a new computational platform that will harmonize pediatric cancer data to enable researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and advocacy groups accelerate the pace of drug development for pediatric cancer.
With funding from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) https://www.cancer.gov via a subcontract with Leidos Biomedical Research, current operator of NCI’s Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research where CHOP researchers created the Molecular Targets Platform.
The Platform will be used to do pediatric research in response to the Research to Accelerate Cures and Equity (RACE) for Children Act. This Act requires companies to test cancer drugs in children that are used in adults when there is a shared molecular target.
The platform allows users to query multiple aspects of pediatric cancer from scored lists of cancer targets in order to profile a gene’s relationship to other cancers and diseases. The interface is publicly available for strategic research into childhood cancer therapies, where it is intended to be used by investigators in academia and industry, FDA, and patient advocates.
According to Deanne M. Taylor, PhD, Director of Bioinformatics in the Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics at CHOP, “The Platform will empower different communities to study new ways of understanding and treating pediatric cancer and will provide a resource for discovery and drug development. The platform will also promote new hypotheses as people use this computational ecosystems to make new discoveries.”