NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey has received a $300,000 donation from the Hugs for Brady Foundation to fund a personalized pediatric cancer treatment research program, Rutgers University said today.
Rutgers said the foundation awarded the funds in order to fill "a need to further explore genomic profiling in pediatric malignancies," as many of the cancer therapies that have been targeted toward specific cancer mutations have been studies only in adult patients.
Investigators at the institute currently are engaged in a genomic analysis trial that is focused on patients with rare or poor-prognosis cancers, and which includes pediatric patients.
Rutgers said a team that includes physician-scientists, bioinformaticians, systems biologists, pathologists, and others meets weekly to discuss patients' profiling results and to determine their therapeutic options.
The trial is led by Shridar Ganesan, associate director for translational science and director of the institute's Functional Genomics Shared Resource, which houses a range of genomics capabilities and services, including genome sequencing, gene expression analysis and profiling, and others.