ST PETERSBURG, Fla. - Governor DeSantis awards Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital $7.5 million in funding for pediatric cancer research.
Working to find a cure and new ways to treat pediatric cancer is more than a job for Dr. Cassandra Josephson. Her brother survived pediatric cancer.
"It was one of the reasons I became a pediatric hematologist and oncologist," she said.
Now, Dr. Josephson, Director of the Cancer & Blood Disorders Institute and a professor of Oncology, Pediatrics and Pathology in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, says a $7.5 million grant the state just awarded to Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital will help others beat it too.
"This is just going to really catapult us as Florida into a new place," Dr. Josephson said.
Monday, Governor Ron DeSantis announced the money for the hospital's Cancer & Blood Disorders Institute, and three other specialty children's hospitals in Florida. The others include Nicklaus Children's in Miami, Nemours Children's in Orlando and Wolfson Children's in Jacksonville.
"Cancer drug and device development continues to lag for pediatric cancer patients, and industry-sponsored cancer trials involving children are limited," Governor DeSantis said at a press conference Monday.
It's part of the Florida Cancer Connect Collaborative Research Incubator Grant program, designed to accelerate childhood cancer research.
What they're saying:
"The amount of money being given is phenomenal and the way that they're giving it to the different hospitals located in different areas in Florida is also amazing because what we really need to do is come together and develop research and develop infrastructure so we can be the premier state that can take care of other patients that can come to our state instead of having to leave," Dr. Josephson said.
According to the National Cancer Institute, about 15,000 children and adolescents are diagnosed with cancer annually in the U.S., but only about four percent of the institute's funding goes towards pediatric cancer research.
"The game changer is this, is that usually there are little, small chunks of money given for pediatric cancer," she said.
At All Children's, they'll use the grant to expand access to and participation in innovative clinical trials, start a statewide interactive database portal to match patients to trials in Florida and create a statewide network to move research discoveries into clinical trials faster. They'll also study how the immune system can be enhanced to fight cancer, and generate, test and deploy next-generation gene and cellular therapies to fight pediatric cancer.
"That means everything from starting the study to running the study with the physicians, and that takes a real village to do, and so, the whole idea is to increase that," Dr. Josephson said. "What we need to do is promote a culture and an ecosystem where we can work together to maximize survival and people not have to go anywhere and then attract people to come here to do the research."
What's next:
The program is projected to last five years, and the grant is renewable. It could fund as much as $37.5 million to each hospital in that time frame. All Children's already collaborates with many of the world's leading hospitals and technology companies to develop data analysis and learn trends that allow medical intervention before something becomes a problem.
The hospital also has a large research operation that includes basic biomedical research to look into pediatric health care. Johns Hopkins All Children's leads Florida in patients who participate in trials through the Children's Oncology Group, a worldwide collaboration among children's hospitals. It's also the only site in Florida that has been designated by the Children's Oncology Group as a Pediatric Early Phase Clinical Trials Network site.