The Valhalla campus of New York Medical College and Westchester Medical Center will be at the center of privately funded clinical therapy trials on young patients stricken with lymphoma for whom traditional cancer treatments have failed.
Officials at New York Medical College said the St. Baldrick”™s Foundation, a California-based charity that raises money for childhood cancer research, has awarded $998,132 to the Childhood and Adolescent Lymphoma Cell Therapy Consortium. The Valhalla medical school is a primary site for the consortium.
Dr. Mitchell Cairo, who will lead the effort on the Westchester medical campus, said the three-year trials will begin in the second quarter of 2012 at Maria Fareri Children”™s Hospital at Westchester Medical Center. Cairo is medical and scientific director at the medical college”™s stem-cell and cellular therapy and engineering clinical laboratory and chief of pediatric hematology, oncology and stem-cell transplantation at the children”™s hospital.
“It”™s a multi-institutional collaboration,” Cairo said. New York Medical College and the children”™s hospital are leading the research on behalf of all participating institutions, along with Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children”™s Hospital. The consortium includes eight academic centers in the U.S.
The intravenous cellular therapy will attack lymphoma cells infected with the Epstein-Barr virus in young cancer patients “who otherwise would have a dismal prognosis,” Cairo said. “It”™s state of the art and we hope it”™s going to revolutionize how we treat patients with lymphoma.”
Lymphoma is the most common cancer in adolescents and young adults between 15 and 30 years old and the third most common cancer in children under the age of 15.
Only 4 percent of all federal cancer research funding is dedicated to pediatric cancer research, according to New York Medical College officials. The nearly $1-million consortium grant is part of more than $21 million in grant awards by the St. Baldrick”™s Foundation in 2011.
