This article shares with you the significance of data in developing childhood cancer research cures, and how that data is collected and shared with the scientific community.

The Data Bridge

The “bridge” in Bridge To A Cure Foundation is built from data — all different kinds of data that help the childhood cancer research community discover new cures. There are many data points to construct the bridge, but biospecimens — in this case, tumor tissue — are by far most important to building a robust data set.

Learning how cancer changes how our cells use DNA and RNA provides critical clues for researchers Seeking out these clues requires quality analysis of DNA and RNA molecules and genes.

Last fall, Bridge To A Cure Foundation partner Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) announced that it was awarded game-changing resources provided through a National Institutes of Health (NIH) program for their Project Accelerate initiative. And in our October 2021 blog “Bridge To A Cure Alliance Partner Awarded Critical Resource Support,” we shared how Project Accelerate promises to turbo-charge the search for childhood brain tumor cures by connecting researchers around the world to the data they desperately need to make new breakthroughs.

The CBTN Operations team has worked feverishly to extract the data from more than 7,000 biospecimens and is making it available to researchers worldwide because we believe a cure for childhood brain tumors exists in this data. Not only that, the data is linked to clinical data, medical models, and other specimens that can be used to provide personalized medicine for each individual child battling the disease. This type of precision medicine improves outcomes for kids. Project Accelerate is the culmination of ten years of work by CBTN to create the infrastructure and collaboration needed to accelerate cures.

CBTN will add this flood of information produced through Project Accelerate to the Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas, making it freely accessible to researchers worldwide by the end of the year.

The Data Journey

Project Accelerate is already underway. This transformational effort is painstaking and requires significant financial investment to see it through to usable data. There are several steps to extracting the precious information we need and delivering it in a form that scientists can use in their research:

Identify the sample. While all types of childhood brain tumors are included in this monumental effort, CBTN is focused first on tumors that most greatly impact a child’s quality of life. CBTN institution lab technicians identify individual tumor samples from among thousands housed in their biobank to ensure this priority.

Extract the DNA and RNA. Technicians extract sample DNA and RNA from the tumor tissue.

Code the data set. Each sample pulled from the tumor tissue is coded with its own tracking information so that it can be traced back to its origin.

Ship data set samples. The coded data set is shipped in a climate-controlled environment with care not to disturb the data sets as they are in transit to the Broad Institute, an MIT and Harvard University collaboration.

Characterize the data. At the Broad Institute, molecular characterization data is generated on each of the samples. They are looking for presence of certain genetic changes in tumor tissue, such as gene mutations or other changes in the DNA or RNA.

Catalog the data. The processed data is recorded by its code and the data set information is added to the CBTN Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas.

Distribute the data. Scientists and researchers can now access the additional data to look for patterns and anomalies that before would not have been possible to observe—promising new advancements toward cures.

When you give to Bridge To A Cure Foundation, you support this arduous bridge-building process now underway at CBTN with Project Accelerate. We need your help right now to uncover the clues — and the cures — we know are hidden in the data. Support Project Accelerate here.

We have a common enemy: childhood brain tumors. The fact is, there have been many amazing oncology professionals, scientists, researchers, and institutions working tirelessly on cures over the past 50 years – half a century! And yet, not one treatment has been developed for childhood brain tumors. Over this time, roughly 750,000 children have endured the painful, cruel journey of the #1 killer of kids by disease.

So what’s missing in our country’s childhood cancer research model that makes progress much slower than it should be?

Collaboration.

Bridge To A Cure greatly respects the work these childhood cancer heroes are doing for childhood cancer patients. We just want them to work together – and to share their data and discoveries to arrive at breakthroughs to cures sooner. We understand that by working together we can accelerate the pace toward cures. And when young lives are waiting for help, and families are holding on to hope, every day matters — every second matters.

There are three major players seeking new therapies for childhood brain tumors:

• Children’s Brain Tumor Network
• Pacific Neuro-Oncology Consortium
• Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium

Additionally, these groups each include approximately 15 research organizations working on childhood brain tumors under their umbrellas. In other words, there are a lot of experts with a lot of knowledge involved in this race to cures. And most of them are holding their data within their own institutions and consortia rather than sharing with the entire childhood cancer research community.

Consortia Collaboration Will Save Lives

Sharing data and patient information will cut years from research to discovery, to trials to effective use, and to saving lives. We could accomplish in ten years what now takes up to twenty. Think of the thousands upon thousands of lives this can save.

We want these three consortia to:

• Molecularly characterize and sequence all biospecimens they house.
• Share data they have about the patients in a way that protects patient privacy. This includes age, lifestyle, other health issues, family histories, and circumstances.
• Share all data from childhood tumors.
• Provide access for all researchers and organizations working on childhood brain tumors.

Creating teamwork within the system will absolutely speed up the process leading to breakthrough results.

Collecting and sharing data is the first step. Next, we need machine learning and AI to help decipher and analyze everything – there’s just too much data for one analyst or team to ever digest. AI is so powerful that it can process in one hour what it would take a researcher to process in a year.

Once the network for sharing is set up, analysts can tap into it and add content they’ve collected that matches up with a similar patient or type of brain tumor whose data research is further along. In this way, more brilliant minds have better knowledge from which to develop treatments and break through to cures.

Obstacles to Collaboration

There are several reasons that data sharing happens less frequently than it could. We understand some of them, and they make a degree of sense from a business perspective. It’s just that in this instance, the business end is inhibiting the health of children.

Key reasons organizations don’t share include:

• Seeing their project through. Research institutions take pride in their work and progress. It’s human nature to want to see what you started through to the end. Unfortunately, this mentality adds years to a potential breakthrough.
• These groups receive grants and donations based on their progress toward discoveries. If essential data is shared, the fear is the money they need would be reduced because they alone are no longer making progress, so they choose to “protect” their data.
• The dilemma is that if an institution or consortium shares data, another may make that final connection to a treatment or cure. And which group will get the credit and the accompanying bounty? Probably the one who finished the process, not the one who laid the foundation.

Bridge To A Cure’s Collaborative Approach

In 2018, under the leadership of Dr. Ned Sharpless, the NCI started the Children’s Cancer Data Initiative. This ten-year, $500 million program will provide researchers and oncologists access to all data for all types of pediatric cancer.

This much-needed initiative is progressing, but much too slowly because they are trying to tackle all childhood cancers at once. Bridge To A Cure Foundation’s plan first addresses the most deadly form of childhood cancers: brain tumors. By doing this, we can move faster to save lives, and can then apply this model not only to other childhood cancers, but to all kinds of serious childhood diseases and disorders.

We believe we can speed up and be the catalyst for change. We understand the players, the situation, and we have the framework to accomplish our mission unify and transform the childhood cancer research community to reduce deaths due to childhood cancer 50% by 2030. 

Learn more about our progress to open up real-time, collaborative access to the data that leads to cures here.

You may have increasingly heard the term personalized medicine used and wondered what it meant. Does it mean there is a treatment made just for you?

Not quite.

Let’s look at it in terms of childhood brain cancers. Bridge To A Cure Foundation stands with partner Children’s Brain Tumor Network. Their mission hits the mark:

The right diagnosis.
The right treatment.
For each child.

Finally, we appear to be moving from a one-size-fits-all treatment to a tailored, personalized approach for treating childhood brain tumors. Up until now, our children have received brain cancer treatments developed for adults, which can cause irreparable damage to their young bodies and minds.

Thanks to increases in funding, large amounts of shared data, and advances in our understanding of how both our bodies and diseases work, treatments can now be developed that are more effective and less harmful for our children. For us, too.

The bottom line? Personalized medicine promises to help our children live better and longer because they’ll receive treatments designed for their needs and bodies.

Why have treatments specifically for childhood brain tumors been so slow to develop?

Several reasons:

1. There are fewer mutations in kids’ genomes than those found in adults, making the cancer difficult to identify.
2. Childhood brain tumors are difficult to target with treatments.
3. Concerns about and risk of dosage and toxicity.
4. Childhood brain tumors are rare, making data scarce.
5. Brain tumors are complicated, with more than 100 different types.
6. There haven’t been enough samples, clinical data, etc., to conduct a study.

Now, these obstacles are steadily being overcome – conquered.

We have a more extensive database of biospecimens being shared – thanks in large part to Project Accelerate. Bridge To A Cure Foundation’s collaboration with Children’s Brain Tumor Network will lead to accelerated discoveries.

This decentralization of data has been vital, but to win the battle against childhood brain tumors, we need to have all institutions worldwide share their data.

The more biospecimens we have, along with additional funding for molecular analysis and sequencing, the more intelligent we can be about what works (and what doesn’t), and the more precise, personalized, and humane we can be with each treatment.

As we shared in previous communications, Project Accelerate will help prioritize the most aggressive tumor types, supporting research for those cancers lacking existing data.

Clinical Trials

In the pediatric space, clinical trials will start to hit the forefront. Rather than repurposing adult treatments and dosages, we’ll be able to develop specific therapies of specialized drugs for childhood brain tumors driven by the genetic and genomic characteristics present in young patients.

This is a big step.

The Race Act

Short for Research to Accelerate Cures and Equity for Children Act, the RACE Act went into effect on August 18, 2020, and significantly increased the number of required studies devoted to pediatric cancer research, drugs, and therapies.

The expectation is that the RACE Act will level the playing field for children with cancer.

Hope

What can we take from all this?

That there is hope!

Advancements are happening. The Bridge To A Cure network of alliances is receiving the attention it has needed, and we’re on the precipice of seeing a tremendous impact. These efforts will define better treatment vulnerabilities and lead to a multi-model approach for treatment.

We’re in an age of significant acceleration, where the use of adult treatments for childhood brain tumors will end.

Together

Bridge To A Cure will continue to help unite and transform our community with the help of innovative partners like Children’s Brain Tumor Network, and ensure that the data out there is available to all those working to find the cures we so desperately want.

We are more empowered, more enabled than ever before. And that feels like progress.

Click here to learn more about how Project Accelerate is advancing discoveries that can lead to cures for childhood brain tumors.

It’s a Big Step, But it’s Still Just a Step.

This past month Bridge To A Cure partner Children’s Brain Tumor Network received government support for the genetic research of childhood tumors.

Finally.

As we all know too well, very little federal funding and support (only $1.7 billion of an annual NIH budget that exceeds $42 billion) has been allocated to childhood cancer in the past.

Now, with this government support, the day is drawing closer to when we will unlock the genetic mysteries behind pediatric brain tumors, accelerating the research process.

What does this new support look like?

It doesn’t look like money, but it does look like a hope for an improved future for childhood cancer patients. It looks like progress. It looks like the opportunity we’ve needed to accelerate our search and discovery of new and more effective treatments explicitly designed for kids.

Rather than a monetary grant, the X01 Sequencing and Genotyping Resource Access program will provide critical NIH-supported resources. These additional resources will allow scientific investigators to better conduct and share their research and studies.

As the NIH X01 program recipient, Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) can now unleash information concealed in thousands of tissue samples across all pediatric brain tumor types. These samples have been collected from 26 CBTN member institutions since 2011.

Thanks to this new support, we can now use these samples to attain molecular characterization for thousands of these brain tumor samples.

This will provide an unprecedented level of insight and pave the way for future therapeutic interventions.

This characterization process, named “Project Accelerate,” will prioritize the most aggressive tumor types, supporting research for those cancers where there is a lack of existing data.

The two primary goals of this project are to:

1. Empower Discoveries
2. Advance Personalized Medicine

CBTN and its partners will reach these goals by connecting, harnessing, and empowering the world’s diverse expertise through collaboration. And this collaboration will lead to accelerated discoveries in research and enable new clinical trials for clinical impact.

Better data access leads to comprehensive data-driven research.

Cancer research has always been data-driven, but the data hasn’t always been available to all investigators. Now, with this influx of government support and the additional resources available, researchers will be able to access, analyze, and share CBTN data on internationally recognized platforms.

This critical government support facilitates a coming together of childhood cancer learnings worldwide. Its access will transform research globally, leading to more progress at faster rates than we’ve ever experienced.

Accelerating breakthroughs.

The following comparison is based on a CBTN investigator’s scientific discovery project timeline. It shows what can now be a reality.

Children’s Brain Tumor Network Story.

The CBTN is a network of researchers, clinicians, patients, and foundations from around the globe dedicated to creating a world where no child dies or suffers from a brain tumor.

Their purpose is to unlock the genetic mysteries behind pediatric brain tumors and accelerate the research process. And the hope is that this research will lead to more effective treatments and cures.

The Children’s Brain Tumor Network drives innovative discoveries, pioneers new treatments, and accelerates open science to improve the health of every child and young adult diagnosed with a brain tumor.

Bridge To A Cure Foundation’s role.

As a CBTN partner, our role continues to be 3-fold:

1. Help unite and transform the childhood cancer community approach to research by making these millions of data points readily and available to investigators.
2. Design a clinical trial process specifically for children.
3. Implement a new approach to research funding.

Speaking of funding.

We still need your help. While the NIH has stepped up and offered incredible access to its resources and data, we need money to help facilitate this process.

How much? $1.3 million. Over the next 12 months.

Our cause is more than just a cause. Our cause is the lives of our children, grandchildren, friends, and family. And it’s by all working together that we’ll keep this wheel rolling to our goal of cutting the childhood cancer death rate by 50% by 2030.

Click here to become a donor. 

Learn more about Project Accelerate on our website.

New paper shows how meta-learning may advance childhood cancer research.

Once again, we’re talking cures. May is Brain Tumor Awareness Month, and we are laser-focused on driving the kind of research needed to discover cures for childhood cancers of the brain — because not one single drug has ever been developed for pediatric brain cancer and this is unacceptable.

We shared in our last blog that there are three components to make critical data available:

• Data collection
• Data storage
• Data access

In our April blog post we discussed how the Pediatric Cancer Data Commons is creating the dictionary for childhood brain tumors to aid data collection. This month we want to highlight the work of the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) to expand the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to fight childhood cancer, greatly accelerating researcher capability to process swaths of data.

CBTN is making headway toward our goal of building a robust database to include everything we know about childhood cancer that can be searched and researched using AI. Bridge To A Cure Foundation sits on the CBTN Executive Council to ensure that the important work of this leading database consortia continues unabated.

As we noted in our January blog, they’re developing a model for attacking brain tumors that can be applied to help all children facing cancer. Because there aren’t enough samples or information at any one hospital for researchers to make meaningful impact on their own, the group pulls together this data globally and makes it available to any researcher who requests it. Currently they supply data in support of 170 projects with leading childhood brain tumor research and treatment centers worldwide.

We’re excited to share this new article in the British Journal of Cancer titled “Meta-learning reduces the amount of data needed to build AI models in Oncology,” which is the first to look at the use of AI using CBTN data.

Meta-learning and its importance to advancing discovery

Meta-learning is described as the use of machine learning algorithms to assist in the training and optimization of other machine learning models. In the AI sense, meta-learning is the ability of an artificially intelligent machine to learn how to carry out various complex tasks, taking the principles it used to learn one task and applying it to other tasks.¹

Transfer learning is a machine learning method in which a model developed for one task is reused as the starting point for a model on a second task. It has been particularly effective in building models for biomedical data.

“Recent genomic studies in oncology demonstrate that meta-learning can facilitate transfer learning and reduce the amount of data that is needed in a target domain by transferring knowledge from abundant genomic data in different source domains enabling the use of AI in data scarce scenarios,” says the article, by Olivier Gevaert.

Related to transfer learning, meta-learning can be thought of as “learning how to learn.” Meta-learning “holds great promise to reduce the amount of biomedical data needed to train predictive models in the target domain of interest,” the new report states. It has been used, for instance, to translate huge amounts of data in a way that can benefit individual patients.

“We show that meta-learning outperforms regular transfer learning and direct learning when predicting survival outcome in a target cancer using data from 33 other cancer sites as source data, reducing the amount of data that is needed in the target domain,” the paper states.

These advances show highly promising applications particularly in the context of rare diseases, such as certain childhood cancer.

One reason new discoveries in childhood cancer have lagged those in adult oncology is the fact that cancers are far more common in adults than in children. As a result, efforts such as CBTN’s face significant challenges in collecting large sets of samples needed for analysis. That is why CBTN’s global and collaborative approach is considered the model for collecting the types and quantity of childhood brain tumor data that can be used by human and artificial intelligence alike to lead to new discoveries toward cures.

“Meta-learning provides opportunities to take advantage of abundant adult data and transfer knowledge to solve questions in pediatric oncology,” the paper states.

This is critical when one considers that brain and central nervous system tumors are the most common cause of death by disease in children from birth to 19 years old in the U.S. and across the globe, affecting 412,000 children and young adults each year.

Much work remains to be done to test meta-learning strategies. Yet our partnership with CBTN is making great strides toward our goal of sparking greater collaboration to accelerate the search for cures.

¹Nelson, Daniel, “What is Meta-Learning?” unite.ai, August 23, 2020