The Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas has awarded nearly $11 million to the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in its latest funding round. That award includes $5 million to help establish the Texas Pediatric Patient-Derived Xenograft Facility.
Peter Houghton, director of the Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute at the Health Science Center, said the grant will be used to develop animal models that can be used to test new therapies in underserved pediatric populations, including minority groups who have not typically responded well to current treatments.
One of the challenges researchers now face is that existing pediatric cancer treatments can be as harmful as the disease.
“The therapies can be very toxic,” Houghton said.
One way researchers can try to improve outcomes is to better understand what they are up against.
“That’s what the CPRIT core grant is about — to try and generate models that create accurately the genetic defects we see in tumors in kids,” Houghton said.
The funding will allow the Health Science Center to collaborate with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas to develop and characterize new patient-derived xenograft models from children that will be made available to pediatric cancer researchers across Texas and elsewhere. The hope is that researchers can gain new insight that ultimately leads to better drug therapies for pediatric cancer patients.
“The more people who get engaged in the study of pediatric cancer, the more likely a breakthrough will occur,” Houghton said.
By the numbers
Health Science Center CPRIT Funding
Here is a breakdown of the balance of the $10.9 million awarded by CPRIT to the San Antonio institution:
$3.6 million
Awarded to the Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute’s Yidong Chen to update and expand existing infrastructure establishing a Cancer Genome Sequencing and Computational Core that will be available to South Texas researchers through the Health Science Center
$2 million
To enable the recruitment of pediatric cancer researcher Myron Ignatius from Massachusetts Hospital and Harvard Medical School
$200,000
To support a research program to study a novel approach to treating Ewing sarcoma, one of the most common bone and soft-tissue cancers found in children and young adults
Source: University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio