Children’s cancer is different.
The methods and medicines used to treat adults are not directly transferrable and there are no obvious behavioural preventions like giving up smoking or staying out of the sun. By definition, all childhood cancers are rare cancers, making up less than one per cent of the total number of new cancer diagnoses in Australia each year.
This difference also extends to research.
Paediatric oncology is one of the very few areas in which clinical research is seamlessly integrated with clinical care and no other field has a higher level of patient enrolment in clinical trials. This has led to huge improvements in treatment, but to make further advances there are some hurdles to overcome – outside the lab. Because of the rarity of childhood cancer, international collaborations are absolutely essential. This has its own knock-on effect, though, and presents challenges such as;
- Difficulty securing competitive grant funding when principal investigators are based overseas
- The significant cost of clinical trials which isn’t included in hospital operating budgets
- No economic incentive for the pharmaceutical industry to sponsor trials due to the rarity of childhood cancer
- Difficulty for clinicians to gain access to targeted drugs and other therapeutic agents because of complex distribution rights and regulatory bureaucracy
ANZCHOG continues to support and advocate for government initiatives and legislative change to improve this situation, for the benefit of children and adolescents with cancer in Australia, New Zealand and across the world.