Children’s Hospital of Michigan, part of the Detroit Medical Center, has been selected to collaborate with St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee on a new precision medicine study aimed at improving leukemia and lymphoma survival rates and quality of life.
The study, labeled Total 17, is the 17th trial in the series and is the largest clinical trial ever run by St. Jude with 1,000 children expected to be treated. Children’s Hospital of Michigan has started enrolling patients in the trial and is one of four centers nationwide and six globally to collaborate on this study.
“Besides leukemia cases being diagnosed at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, we also send samples to St. Jude for further analysis,” says Dr. Jeffery Taub, division chief of oncology and principal investigator of the Total 17 study at Children’s Hospital of Michigan.
“For the Total17 protocol, patients can receive several days of treatment somewhere else and potentially come to Children’s Hospital of Michigan and switch to being treated on the Total17 protocol. We also have the AML16 protocol in collaboration with St. Jude for patients with acute myeloid leukemia.”
Total 17 is for those who have been newly diagnosed with the blood cell cancers acute lymphoblastic leukemia or acute lymphoblastic lymphoma. Participants of the three stage, two-and-a-half-year therapy must be between 1 and 18 years of age and have limited or no prior therapy.
“Genes can predispose children to cancer or regulate medication response,” Taub says. “Every child who enrolls in Total 17 will undergo genomic testing of both normal tissue and leukemia cells to guide therapy.”
