NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — The New York Genome Center and The Sohn Conference Foundation said today that they have launched The Sohn Collaborative for Pediatric Cancer Research.
Fueled by a two-year, $2.4 million grant from the Sohn Conference Foundation, the new cancer research center will focus on two childhood cancers: pediatric leukemia and neuroblastoma, the partners said.
NYGC will act as a nexus and participant in the collaborative, which will also include five of NYGC's founding members: Columbia University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York University School of Medicine, Rockefeller University, and Weill Cornell Medical College. NYGC will also conduct the genome sequencing and computational analysis.
Under the grant, the partnering institutions will apply genomics to identify and analyze why some children's tumors respond readily to treatment while other patients suffer relapses or have no response at all. Although leukemia and neuroblastoma are very different, NYGC noted, the researchers will use a similar approach to understand them by sequencing the genomes of outlier tumors.
"With generous financial support from The Sohn Conference Foundation and the alliance of outstanding researchers, we are poised to achieve remarkable advances in the understanding and treatment of these cancers," Robert Darnell, CEO, president and scientific director of NYGC, said in a statement.