About Children’s Cancer

Cancers which affect children

Children’s cancers, which affect children aged 15 and under, are rarer than adult cancers. Yet for children with cancer and their families a cancer diagnosis is very deeply distressing.

Children’s cancers are quite different from the cancers which affect adults. Children’s cancers tend to occur in different parts of the body and viewed under a microscope they look quite different and their response to treatment is also different.

These are the cancers diagnosed in children:

• Acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) and Acute myeloid leukemia (AML)
• Central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) cancers
• Neuroblastoma
• Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Hodgkin’s lymphoma
• Wilms tumour
• Retinoblastoma
• Germ cell tumours
• Sarcomas: Rhabdomyosarcoma, Osteosarcoma, Ewing’s sarcoma
• Langerhans’ cell histiocytocis (LCH)
• Other rare childhood cancers

About children’s cancer research

There have been tremendous advances in the diagnosis, management and treatment of children’s cancers in the last four decades. We have moved from a situation where cancer in children was almost uniformly fatal. In the 1960′s around the world fewer than 3 in 10 children survived cancer. Now cure rates for children are much higher than for most adult cancers – over 70% of all children can now be cured.

(NB: To compare the results of treatments, doctors use five or 10-year survival rates. Five-year survival means the percentage of patients live five years after diagnosis.)

The human genome project has opened new avenues of research into cellular resistance while the latest molecular and imaging techniques are adding to the accuracy and precision of diagnosis. These advances mean we are now able to look at improving treatments and minimising toxicity to reduce side effects, improving quality of life and researching causes and prevention. Research will continue to improve treatments and reduce side effects.

What is ACRF doing about cancers in children?

Of course 70% survival for children with cancer is still not good enough. But it is so important that high quality research projects into cancers affecting children continue to get major funding.

In June 2007, a single grant for $3.1 million in the name of the late Mrs Berenice M McDonnellestablished a dedicated childhood cancer drug discovery unit at the Children’s Cancer Institute Australia.

In 2006 the ACRF awarded a $1.14 million grant to the Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland. In 2005 ACRF provided $1 million for a fit-out of the new Children’s Cancer Centre Research Laboratories as part of a $20million capital works program at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.

In 2003 $500,000 was awarded by ACRF to the Children’s Cancer Institute of Australia for Medical Research to establish a new drug discovery program. The new laboratories (pictured above) which opened recently, are devoted to the design, synthesis and testing of novel anti-cancer compounds that deactivate a tumour’s blood supply and thereby restrict its growth.

Find out how the ACRF is working to defeat Children’s cancer