In an effort to improve outcomes for patients with some of the deadliest childhood cancers, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists have created the world’s largest collection of pediatric solid tumor samples, drug-sensitivity data and related information and have made the resource available at no charge to the global scientific community.

St. Jude and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute collaborated to create the resource, known as the Childhood Solid Tumor Network.

The work was reported as an advance online publication in the journal Nature.

“Survival rates for children with recurrent solid tumors have not improved significantly in more than 20 years and remain below 30 percent,” said corresponding author Michael Dyer, PhD, chair of the St. Jude Department of Developmental Neurobiology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “This research will change that by promoting scientific collaboration to leverage the efforts of researchers worldwide to advance understanding and ultimately treatment of pediatric solid tumors.”

The project has already helped identify children with the muscle tumor rhabdomyosarcoma as the pediatric solid tumor patients most likely to benefit from combination chemotherapy that includes the experimental drug AZD1775. Planning has begun to incorporate the finding into an ongoing national clinical trial of the combination therapy for certain high-risk pediatric solid tumor patients.

Pediatric solid tumors are rare and so are the tissue samples and other resources needed to advance their understanding and treatment. Solid tumors of the bone, muscle, kidney, eye and other organs excluding the brain account for about 30 percent of childhood cancers. While the overall cure rate for these pediatric solid tumors is 75 percent, long-term survival is much lower for the approximately 30 percent of patients whose tumors return.

The Childhood Solid Tumor Network was created to share the patient tumor samples and other scientific resources Dyer and his colleagues have developed by learning to grow human tumors in the same organ in mice. The network now includes samples from more than 67 different patient tumors representing 12 types of pediatric solid tumors. Along with the tumor samples, information about the drug sensitivity, pharmacokinetics and the molecular make-up of the tumors is also available. Accessing the data requires no commitment to collaborate with St. Jude scientists. The network has significantly expanded scientific resources for pediatric solid tumor research. For example, through the Childhood Solid Tumor Network, investigators studying the bone cancer osteosarcoma have an additional 20 patient tumor samples available for research to supplement five osteosarcoma cell lines now widely used to study the tumor. For the eye tumor retinoblastoma, available resources increased from two cell lines that have been widely used for research to an additional 18 retinoblastoma tumor samples.

“When the St. Jude–Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project started to sequence the complete tumor and normal genome of pediatric cancer patients, we realized we needed better models to take full advantage of the discoveries,” Dyer said. The genome project, which began in 2010, sequenced the genomes of more than 800 children and adolescents with some of the least understood and most difficult to treat cancers.