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ACRF Precision Medicine Centre for Childhood Cancer

  • Research Institute: Children's Cancer Institute of Australia

  • Amount granted: $1.5 million

  • Year granted: 2014

The funding ACRF has enabled the establishment of a unique precision (personalised) medicine centre which heralds a new era in childhood cancer research and treatment.
The ACRF Child Cancer Personalised Medicine Centre was officially opened by His Excellency General the Honourable Sir Peter Cosgrove AK MC (Retd), Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia and Patron of Children’s Cancer Institute in September 2015.

The Centre houses robotics, libraries of known and clinically-approved drugs, expanded tumour bank facilities, tissue culture and a state-of-the-art laboratory information management system. It also serves as operational headquarters for the Zero Childhood Cancer program, a national initiative of Children’s Cancer Institute and the Kids Cancer Centre at Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick.

Over the next years, the Centre will receive and process hundreds of samples of patients’ tumours from partner children’s hospitals around Australia, will analyse the samples and test them against libraries of drugs approved for a range of adult and child cancers.

The drug-screening data that the robots will identify, the drugs and drug combinations most likely to be effective in stopping the growth of each individual patient’s cancer cells, will form part of the reports that will go to clinicians, to guide treatment as part of the national clinical trial of the Zero Childhood Cancer Program.

Chief Investigators: Professor Michelle Haber AM, Professor Murray Norris, Professor Glenn Marshall AM, Professor Maria Kavallaris, Professor Richard Lock, Associate Professor Paul Ekert

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