Novel Models of Paediatric Cancer

Cancer in children represents ∼3% of the global incidence of cancer. Pediatric cancer exerts an outsized impact: beyond the physical and emotional toll on children, their families and the community, the number of years of productive life lost to pediatric cancers is proportionately higher than that of adult cancers. In the treatment of children and adolescents with cancer, multimodal approaches combining surgery, chemotherapy and radiation can cure many patients, but may cause lifelong health problems in survivors. Current therapies only modestly reflect increased knowledge about the molecular mechanisms of these cancers. Advances in next-generation sequencing have enabled unprecedented cataloguing of genetic aberrations in tumors, but understanding how these genetic changes drive cellular transformation, and how they can be effectively targeted, will require multidisciplinary collaboration and preclinical models that are truly representative of the in vivo environment. This meeting aims to focus on models and technologies that have the potential to transform our understanding of these diseases.