Stratified Medicine Paediatrics 2

Research summary

StratMedPaeds2 aims to develop new tests that identify treatment for children who fail therapy and experience cancer relapse. It builds on the success achieved in StratMedPaeds1, which provided a national pathway to molecularly test tumour tissue and blood in children who relapse, and feed usable information about treatment and mechanisms of treatment failure to clinicians and researchers seeking to improve survival for these children. Having delivered several effective tests to the NHS, StratMedPaeds2 will move on to address four important issues of relevance to children: 1) Existing NHS molecular tests fail to identify treatments in the majority of children who relapse – we aim to develop better tests to increase the proportion of patients that clinicians can successfully treat 2) Existing NHS diagnostic tests require tissues to be obtained from patients which is costly, clinically risky and stressful to patients – we aim to maximise the amount of clinically relevant information obtained from tissue biopsies if they must be done, but ideally to develop tests that work in blood 3) Existing NHS tests take too long to report results to clinicians – we aim to reduce this time to days or hours 4) Existing NHS tests fail to detect cancer relapse early – we aim to test whether we can screen patients for cancer relapse using existing and new tests, in order to enrol them to treatment early and understand if this increases their survival Patients with a relapsed/refractory paediatric malignancy may be eligible for this study. Up to 400 patients will be recruited from 20 UK hospitals. Patients will be involved in the study for a minimum of three years; samples from routine biopsies (including bone marrow and cerebrospinal fluid) and blood tests will collected, along with clinical data from patients standard hospital visits. One additional blood sample at study entry will be required for some patients.

Principal Investigator

Dr Shaun Robert Wilson

Contact us

Email: rhiannon.collins@ouh.nhs.uk

IRAS number

346034