Cesare Spadoni, founder of aPODD (accelerate Paediatric Oncology Drug Development), talks to Pan Pantziarka about the problems in drug development in children's cancers, and about the crowdfunding campaign to find a new treatment for Medulloblastoma.
Pan: What is the aPODD foundation aiming to do?
Cesare: aPODD (accelerate Paediatric Oncology Drug Development) was set up with the mission to speed up the development of better and safer treatments for children with cancer. This is a cause that is very close to my heart. I lost my first daughter to cancer a few years ago. That is when I began thinking about doing something for children with cancer.
Obviously, you can have a positive impact on sick children and their families in many different ways. In my case, because of my professional background in drug development, I felt compelled to do something to address the major problem preventing any further clinical improvement for children and adolescents with cancer: the lack of therapeutic options and the delayed access to the most innovative treatments.
Specific anti-cancer drugs are not developed for younger patients because it is not profitable for industry to do so. This is an area where patients’ organisations may play a vital role. Drug repurposing is certainly an area we are very much interested in. By looking at existing drugs we may be in a position to identify possible new treatments much faster and at a fraction of the cost and risk of new drug development
Pan: How is this campaign different to others?
Cesare: We are looking to identify a potential new treatment for Medulloblastoma, a rather aggressive form of brain cancer that is more frequent in children and adolescents. The current therapeutic options for this cancer are limited and very harsh, including high dose chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The impact on patients may be devastating as the lucky survivors may face severe health problems later in life.
For this project we are partnering with Healx, a company based in Cambridge (UK), which offers very advanced technologies and strong expertise in drug re-purposing. Healx is applying advanced computational biology tools, data analytics and machine learning to make sense of complex biological data sets and match those with the profiles of known drugs.
We are now in the process of finalising a list of drugs that we would like to test experimentally in Medulloblastoma cell lines in view of progressing further with the most promising ones.
We are very excited by these early results and we are really hope that this crowdfunding is successful so that we can proceed as fast as we can.
Pan: What is the aPODD foundation aiming to do?
Cesare: aPODD (accelerate Paediatric Oncology Drug Development) was set up with the mission to speed up the development of better and safer treatments for children with cancer. This is a cause that is very close to my heart. I lost my first daughter to cancer a few years ago. That is when I began thinking about doing something for children with cancer.
Obviously, you can have a positive impact on sick children and their families in many different ways. In my case, because of my professional background in drug development, I felt compelled to do something to address the major problem preventing any further clinical improvement for children and adolescents with cancer: the lack of therapeutic options and the delayed access to the most innovative treatments.
Specific anti-cancer drugs are not developed for younger patients because it is not profitable for industry to do so. This is an area where patients’ organisations may play a vital role. Drug repurposing is certainly an area we are very much interested in. By looking at existing drugs we may be in a position to identify possible new treatments much faster and at a fraction of the cost and risk of new drug development
Pan: How is this campaign different to others?
Cesare: We are looking to identify a potential new treatment for Medulloblastoma, a rather aggressive form of brain cancer that is more frequent in children and adolescents. The current therapeutic options for this cancer are limited and very harsh, including high dose chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The impact on patients may be devastating as the lucky survivors may face severe health problems later in life.
For this project we are partnering with Healx, a company based in Cambridge (UK), which offers very advanced technologies and strong expertise in drug re-purposing. Healx is applying advanced computational biology tools, data analytics and machine learning to make sense of complex biological data sets and match those with the profiles of known drugs.
We are now in the process of finalising a list of drugs that we would like to test experimentally in Medulloblastoma cell lines in view of progressing further with the most promising ones.
We are very excited by these early results and we are really hope that this crowdfunding is successful so that we can proceed as fast as we can.
