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Helping Children Overcome Childhood Cancers “As children come in, we match their diagnoses with relevant protocols,” says Peri Kamalakar, MD, Director of the Valerie Fund. Dr. Kamalakar and his colleagues currently participate in 68 research protocols through CHNJ’s membership in the Children’s Oncology Group (COG), a National Cancer Institute-supported cooperative group whose mission is to study childhood cancer. Dr. Kamalakar serves as principal investigator at NBIMC for these trials. Among the open protocols at CHNJ is one investigating acute lymphocytic leukemia, the most common form of cancer seen in children under 15 years of age. “We [the COG] have been able to re-classify the ‘risk’ assignment based on extensive data from the past several years. For children in the ‘low-risk’ category, we plan to reduce the intensity of chemotherapy so that we can reduce the morbidity from the treatment, as well as the cost,” Dr. Kamalakar explains. The new risk assignment scale also allows pediatric oncologists to quickly identify children who are in the high-risk category. “We can treat them with more intensive therapy. This would help improve their survival rate.” Thanks to the COG and its member hospitals including CHNJ, significant progress as been made in the treatment of other childhood cancers, including advanced stage neuroblostoma, a relatively common childhood cancer with a low success rate. According to Dr. Kamalakar, the COG’s collective research resulted in new biological therapy that is now given to patients with this disease, following intensive chemotherapy. “This is to eliminate residual disease so that long-term survival can be improved,” he says. Other aspects of childhood cancer that are being studied through COG protocols at CHNJ include new methods of treating Hodgkins disease, and survival differences in minority vs. Caucasian children with leukemia.
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