An innovative new clinical trial launching this year at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia may not only help patients who have no further proven treatment options for neuroblastoma, a high-risk cancer, but may also be a model for how precision medicine clinical trials can spur better and faster cancer therapy discoveries in the future.

The trial uses a dynamic design, which allows researchers to quickly translate findings from the lab based on the evolving individual characteristics of each patient’s tumor. It is the first time such a strategy is being applied to a prospective clinical trial in children with cancer. Known as the NExt-generation Personalized NEuroblastoma THErapy (NEPENTHE) trial, it is moving forward with a new $1.5 million grant from Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF), announced in December.

“The novelty of this trial could be viewed on numerous levels,” said principal investigator Yael Mossé, MD, a CHOP pediatric oncologist and assistant professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s based on rigorous preclinical data, understanding the molecular drivers that are important in this disease. It’s combining multiple novel drugs, not just one at a time. And it’s bringing that to the clinic and assigning patients to therapy based on what their tumor genetics are teaching us at the time that they meet us with relapsed or refractory cancer.”