Accomplishments
The Cancer and Blood Disease Institute is one of the largest and most influential members of the Children’s Oncology Group, a cooperative of 237 of the country’s most prestigious pediatric research centers.
The Institute has made significant advancements in cancer care for children. The Cancer and Blood Disease Institute pioneered treatments now used as the standard for acute leukemia, the most common childhood cancer.
The Cancer and Blood Disease Institute was the first to develop and provide many leading-edge treatments for children:
- Provision of modern chemotherapy to children with leukemia in the Western United States
- Development of the first protected-environment units for children undergoing intensive chemotherapy and stem cell transplant
- Development and provision of a multidisciplinary approach for treating pediatric sarcomas of the bladder and prostate, which yields a much better survival rate and reduces the need to remove these organs, leaving the child anatomically intact
- Development of the first pelvic bone salvage protocols for children with bone tumors, leading to pioneering limb-saving techniques
- Development of a comprehensive psychosocial support program specifically geared towards the consequences of childhood and adolescent cancers and blood diseases
The Cancer and Blood Disease Institute pioneered:
- Use of non-irradiation conditioning bone marrow transplant regimens for children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) (which resulted in a decrease in the long-term side effects of treatment)
- A neuroblastoma treatment regimen that has increased survival rates to 65 percent (this treatment is now used nationwide and includes a high-dose chemotherapy and local irradiation protcol - total body irradiation is not used)
- Use of retinoic acid as a post-transplant therapy for neuroblastoma (a treatment that was found to decrease recurrence of disease)
- Use of gene therapy for recurring brain tumors
- Combining laser technology and chemotherapy for treatment of retinoblastoma, significantly reducing the need for enucleation (clinicians have heralded this as the most significant therapeutic advance in the treatment of retinoblastoma in 25 years)
- Use of minimally-invasive surgical techniques (laproscopy and thoracoscopy) in biopsy, staging, and treatment
The Cancer and Blood Disease Institute was the first to use bone marrow transplantation to:
- Treat pediatric blood diseases
- Treat genetic diseases
- Purge for neuroblastoma
