In a two-day pediatric cancer summit in March 2022 led by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), experts from around the world gathered in Philadelphia and virtually to discuss the latest scientific advancements and breakthroughs in pediatric precision medicine oncology. Entitled “Personalizing Pediatric Cancer Care: Innovation through Collaboration,” the summit was the inaugural occurrence of what co-chairs John M. Maris, MD and Marilyn M. Li, MD hope will be a biennial event, alternately hosted by CHOP and the University of California-San Francisco.
Transcript
Personalizing Pediatric Cancer Care Summit 2022: Highlights
Jason Roberts: My name is Jason and I, alongside my colleagues, am thrilled to tell you about our inaugural summit event -- Personalizing Pediatric Cancer Care: Innovation Through Collaboration -- a first of its kind, gathering for CHOP, bringing together the best and brightest minds in pediatric cancer from around the world to discuss advances in precision medicine based care.
Holly Hoffman: I'm Holly, the project manager for the Pediatric Cancer Summit. Our inaugural summit event was held March 10th and 11th, 2022 at the Rittenhouse Hotel. And here's a peak at how things went.
John Maris, MD: The organizers of this started organizing this meeting almost four years ago. We had to postpone it twice, but stuck with it. And I'm so glad to see everyone here, friends, colleagues, and new faces. We have a group of speakers here who can really highlight, not what's been published and what we all know from the literature, but really where the field is going.
Adam Resnick, PhD: Innovation happens at the edge and then moves in and pediatrics is at the edge and we have really unique opportunities to build infrastructure in ways that adult communities likely will never develop on their own, especially on behalf of precision medicine.
Speaker: We have to move from thinking of genetic medicine as genetic testing. They're not the same. Testing is just the point of entry. Really what we need is genetic care, right? We need to transition the nature of the field. We really have to think holistically about cancer risk. It's not adults in isolation. It's not identifying these things in kids and then sort of handing off to our adult colleagues, right. But we have to think about this as a family centered care program.
John Maris, MD: This is the first major conference to bring an international group of experts who focus on thinking differently about how we treat children with cancer. What we're really hoping for is to extend or establish collaborations so that we, as a community work together on big problems. I'm seeing that already, just through the morning. And I think that this will be a really important night for the future of pediatric cancer research.
Marilyn Li, MD: What I would like to see the most is not just that they take the knowledge back to their daily practice, but also to consider collaboration, to consider data sharing so that we can have a large enough data resources that will help us to interpret the genomic data and community data and the economics data and to bring the new technology and that provides the benefit to the pediatric cancer patient.
Jinghui Zhang, PhD: This is the first time I got a chance to speak to a real audience without wearing a mask, and the interactions from everyone, engagement and intellectual stimulation is just wonderful. So thank you all.
Jason Roberts: I am so proud of what we accomplished together -- advancing personalized care for children fighting cancer everywhere.
Meghan Martin: Our inaugural summit event drew more than 200 industry disruptors, researchers, innovators, and change agents seeking to advance precision medicine and pediatric cancer care.
Holly Hoffman: We were honored to showcase 14 abstract posters presented by talented cancer researchers and clinicians, seeking to shine light on the amazing work they're doing to help drive change in this field.
Jason Roberts: Twenty-four renowned guest speakers presented at our summit event, and we were supported by corporate sponsors who were driving technology, innovative diagnostics and therapeutic advances in pediatric cancer, including Illumina, Mayo Clinic, Pfizer, Novartis, Bayer, Lab Corps and Roche, as well as our own CHOP labs and cancer center outreach teams. To all who helped us bring life to this inaugural event, thank you. We hope this platform for collaboration continues to accelerate innovation and personalizing pediatric cancer care.
Related Centers and Programs: Cancer Center