In November 2014, the Team Finn Foundation donated $75,000 to the BC Cancer Agency in support of its Pediatric Genomic (POG) project.
The BC Cancer Agency is committed to a project that will sequence the tumours of terminally ill cancer patients in hopes of using genomic information to help find treatments for those who have no more treatment options. With support and encouragement from Team Finn, children were added to this project (known as Pediatric POG) in late 2013/early 2014.
The vision of the BC Cancer Agency is that patients will have their genomic profiles determined upon diagnosis and appropriate patient-specific treatments will be planned based on the genetic alterations found in the tumours. Because of the scale of this change and the many aspects of the cancer care system it will affect, the Pediatric Personalized Medicine Project is an important first step in making this goal a reality. It will provide evidence for moving personalized medicine into the clinic, setting the stage for changes in care.
Each profile generated by this project will be compared to all known drugs – for cancer or otherwise – to see if there are matches between the found mutation and the drugs’ targets. If so, a patient-specific treatment plan may be designed to help these young people who are often subject to the “anything and everything” approach.
At the Team Finn Foundation, we believe that genomic sequencing and the “omics” that builds on top of this genomic analysis offers hope. The hope of helping us understand how different cancers work. Why they work. And then how to treat them. And then how to stop them.
This is the type of research that Team Finn has been and will continue to support. Not just because the research offers hope, but also because the knowledge gains from pediatric tumour groups are not limited to children and will translate into changes in the adult world.