A special space is open on the walls of Adeline Vanderver, MD's, new office for a framed collage of "Commander" Massimo "Mo" Damiani, a toddler wearing an orange jumpsuit who looks ready to join a NASA astronaut team. Dr. Vanderver, a child neurologist and geneticist, helped to pinpoint his rare subtype of leukodystrophy, a group of inherited degenerative diseases that
Despite advances in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia treatment, between 15 and 20 percent of children who achieve an initial complete remission will relapse. They may need more intensive therapy or alternative approaches, but physicians do not yet have a reliable way of predicting which patients are at high-risk of relapse.
Researchers use next-generation sequencing to gain a deeper understanding of the tumors' genetics, with the ultimate goal of developing highly targeted therapies. How time flies! It seems almost impossible that the many events of 2003 are now almost ten years in the past.
Stay tuned! The work of married CHOP geneticists Ian D. Krantz, MD, and Nancy B. Spinner, PhD, will be featured on PBS's Religion & Ethics Newsweekly this Friday, January 25. The program will air online ahead of its being shown on television. See below for a preview of the segment. We'll also be sure to update this space with the full
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and China-based BGI-Shenzhen are now collaborating on research into next-generation sequencing to analyze pediatric brain tumors.
After a decade of work and at an expense of nearly $3 billion, the sequencing of the human genome was completed in 2003. Advances since then have made individual sequencing much more widely available - an individual's genome can now be sequenced in months, for a few thousand dollars.
For decades, researchers at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia have worked to better understand and treat neuroblastoma, a cancer of nerve tissue.Neuroblastoma is frequently aggressive, causing approximately 12 percent of all childhood cancer deaths. In high-risk forms of the disease, the cancer tends to return after initial treatment, often with deadly results.
Using powerful gene-analysis tools, investigators at Children's Hospital have
