Lead Principal Investigator
Samuel Volchenboum, MD, PhD
- Dean of Master’s Education
- Associate Professor of Pediatrics
- Director, Pediatric Cancer Data Commons
- Associate Director, Institute for Translational Medicine
- Associate Chief Research Informatics Officer
- University of Chicago
- Learn More About Dr. Volchenboum
Although cure rates for children with cancer have improved dramatically over the past 50 years, kids with relapsed or refractory disease still have dismal outcomes. Kids who relapse are often placed on traditional chemotherapy while additional testing is performed to understand the options for subsequent, tumor-directed therapy. This delays the delivery of precision therapy by weeks or months. Children often die while waiting to be matched to a trial.
We have built a platform called GEARBOx (Genomic Eligibility Algorithm at Relapse for Better Outcomes) that holds the promise of completely changing this paradigm. As soon as a clinician knows that a child has relapsed or refractory disease, they can use GEARBOx to query open clinical trials, seeing immediately which trials are a potential match, based on the patient’s clinical and genomic testing and information abstracted from the trial protocol. Additional information is available to the clinician to help facilitate the enrollment of the child on the trial.
We recently launched GEARBOx for any physician with a patient with acute myelogenous leukemia, a deadly form of childhood blood cancer. We will now expand GEARBOx to several other types of pediatric cancer. In the process, we will create more efficient ways to extract criteria from trials using natural language processing. The interface will be updated to allow greater flexibility in determining matches and expanded information about the open trials. In addition, connections to third parties will be established to facilitate the automatic import of genomic biomarkers for faster and more accurate trial matching.
Learn more about GEARBOX:
Pediatric Cancer Data Commons Annual Report
Douglas Hawkins, MD
- Chair, Children's Oncology Group
- Professor of Pediatrics, Hematology/Oncology Division
- Seattle Children's Hospital
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Katherine Janeway, MD, MMSc
- Director of Clinical Genomics
- Senior Physician
- Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
- Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center
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Julie Glade Bender, MD
- Vice-Chair for Clinical Research
- Pediatric Oncologist
- Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
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Donald (Will) Parsons, MD
- Deputy Director, Texas Children's Cancer and Hematology Center
- Co-Director, Brain Tumor Program
- Co-Director, Cancer Genetics and Genomics Program
- Director, Center for Precision Oncology
- Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Section of Hematology-Oncology
- Baylor College of Medicine
- Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center
- Learn More About Dr. Parsons
Susan Cohn, MD
- Professor of Pediatrics
- Director, Clinical Sciences
- University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center
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E. Anders Kolb, MD
- Director, Blood & Bone Marrow Transplantation
- Alfred I duPont Hospital for Children
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Junne Kamihara, MD, PhD
- Co-Director, Pediatric Cancer Genetic Risk Program
- Co-Director, Ocular Oncology Program
- Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
- Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center
- Learn More About Dr. Kamihara
Elizabeth A. Mullen, MD
- Assistant Professor, Director of Renal Tumors Program, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
- Learn More About Dr. Mullen
Anne Lindsay Frazier, M.D. Sc.M
- Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School
- Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
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Sarah E. S. Leary, MD, MS
- Professor of Pediatrics, University of Washington School of Medicine
- Medical Director, Pediatric Brain Tumor Program, Seattle Children’s
- Medical Director, Clinical Research, Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research, Seattle Children’s Research Institute
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Jamie E. Flerlage, MD, MS
- Associate Professor, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
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Allison F. O’Neill, MD
- Assistant Professor, Senior Physician
- Clinical Director, Solid Tumor Program
- Director, Liver Tumor Center of Excellence, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
- Learn More About Dr. O’Neill