Alice’s Arc, US is delighted to announce its launch of a new initiative in conjunction with St. Baldrick’s Foundation Empowering Pediatric Immunotherapies for Childhood Cancer (EPICC) Consortium. Funds have been raised by our US Arc families, through corporate partnerships & via an innovative charity partnership funding model with Children with Cancer UK which will now support a three-year grant of up to $750,000, starting on 1st January 2025. This work will be done within the EPICC Consortium. https://www.stbaldricks.org/epicc
The scope for research will focus on rhabdomyosarcoma and address questions around the discovery & development of new IO targets for rhabdomyosarcoma, leveraging the PAX:FOXO1 fusion for novel therapeutics, novel CAR T cell, antibody drug conjugate, monoclonal antibody and/or vaccine approaches to rhabdomyosarcoma therapy and for novel IO combinations such as with protein degradation approaches, epigenetic modifiers, or other therapeutic strategies. The project will complement the work already being funded by Alice’s Arc in the UK in the labs of Dr Karin Straathof (UCL Cancer Institute) and Dr Sam Behjati (Wellcome Sanger Institute) and collaboration will be encouraged.
The goal of this work is to identify new treatments for improving outcomes for children, adolescents and young adults with rhabdomyosarcoma. We have chosen to partner with SBF EPICC due to its track-record and established reputation working on childhood cancers such as blood cancers, neuroblastoma & brain tumours. The time is right to translate the expertise of this leading group (comprising teams from CHOP, NCI, Stanford, St Jude, Texas Children’s, Seattle Children’s and more) to work on devising these new therapies for rhabdomyosarcoma.
The consortium have been operating since 2013 and have pushed the first gene therapies over the finish line for FDA approval, treated more than 1370 patients on 45 clinical trials and discovered new immunotherapy targets that can be game-changers.
We look forward to announcing the details of what promises to be a hugely impactful project designed to change how rhabdomyosarcoma is treated in the future. We are so grateful to SBF EPICC, the families we work with and the scientists willing to make this work happen.
