Funding outcome

Childhood cancers are one of the leading causes of deaths in children. In Canada, around 1000 children under the age of 15 are diagnosed with cancer every year. One of the most common childhood cancers is that of the brain and spinal cord, accounting for approximately 1/3 of patients. The treatment is almost as bad as the disease itself and patients often end up with long-term effects in their brain development. Significant advances have been made in our understanding of paediatric cancer genetics, including the discovery of molecules in the blood that help clinicians track the outlook for patients, but sampling tumours for these molecules requires biopsies that are often risky. Scientists have made huge advances to help create patient-specific therapies based on these molecular red-flags, but the danger of biopsies remains and therefore there is a need to develop safer sampling methods. New technologies like liquid biopsies, samples of fluids like blood and cerebrospinal fluid, take advantage of the discovery that these tissues contain small amounts of tumour DNA, providing a safer alternative biopsy method. This technology has been well developed for many adult cancers, but the same can not be said for paediatric patients as the cancers seen in adults compared to children are often very different; adult cancers are often the result of many small mutations while paediatric cancers are more likely to be caused by changes to entire chromosomes. This results in the major challenge of translating the overwhelming amount of molecular data collected from child patients into effective patient care. We aim to leverage the lab's experience in developing liquid biopsy assays to expand this tool with the goal of detecting changes in the cerebrospinal fluid and/or plasma that help in diagnosing and guiding patient-specific medicine.