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Texas Children’s Cancer Center/Baylor College of Medicine is extremely grateful for the generous and continued support provided by Parents Against Cancer for the Center’s drug development program. In 2003, in honor of Parents Against Cancer, this program was named the Parents Against Cancer Developmental Therapeutics Program. Advances in the treatment of childhood malignancies over the past 40 years have improved overall cure rates to greater than 70%. However, the prognosis for a number of childhood cancers remains poor. The goal of the Parents Against Cancer Developmental Therapeutics Program is to identify and develop safe and effective new anticancer agents for these childhood cancers through scientifically rational and efficient clinical and laboratory research.
The support provided by Parents Against Cancer has been instrumental in helping us move closer to achieving this goal. It has greatly facilitated our laboratory and clinical research efforts to develop new anti-cancer drugs for children. For example, as a direct result of Parents Against Cancer’s support, we developed and completed the first pediatric clinical trial of a promising new anti-cancer agent, Karenitecin.
Building on these results, we will soon initiate a study of Karenitecin given in combination with another very active anti-cancer drug, Cyclophosphamide. In addition to these studies, Parents Against Cancer’s support has allowed us to develop new clinical trials for children with acute leukemia, including a study of the promising new drug Gemcitabine, for the treatment of central nervous system leukemia, and a clinical study of another agent, PS341, for children with bone marrow relapse. None of this groundbreaking research would have been possible without the continued support of Parents Against Cancer and its remarkable volunteers.
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