Our Research

Project term: 2024-2029

Together with our colleagues at Team PROTECT, we aim to establish a platform to develop and test drugs targeting the undrugged drivers of childhood solid tumours, with the vision to develop the next generation of therapeutic approaches for children with cancers of unmet clinical need. 

Survival rates for children with solid tumours, including brain tumours, have largely stagnated over the past 30 years. Cures for these cancers will require innovative interventions that specifically target the unique biology of childhood solid tumours. With advances in targeted protein degradation and chemical interventions to inhibit protein-protein interactions, it has recently become tractable to target the oncoprotein drivers of childhood cancers that were previously thought to be ‘undruggable’.  

To fuel the next wave of improvements in childhood cancer outcomes, Team PROTECT will utilise innovative approaches involving targeted protein degradation to target the undrugged drivers of childhood cancers of high unmet clinical need, as well as explore ways to improve the efficacy of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy.  

By developing a sustainable platform that will result in a ‘pipeline’ of paediatric-specific drug development candidates, the team aims to provide a blueprint to apply targeted protein degradation and other novel approaches including multi-modal combinations to target the most challenging childhood cancer targets. 

A total of ten cancer centers from five countries are involved in the international “PROTECT” team, led by the Hopp Children’s Cancer Center in Heidelberg (KiTZ), the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and Stanford University in California. It is one of five projects being funded by the “Cancer Grand Challenges” initiative with up to $25 million each.

Project term: 2025-2028

ITCC-P4 is supporting the european BrainTAP programme by testing new promising therapeutic approaches to combat childhood brain tumours.

Almost 2,000 new brain tumours are diagnosed per year in the EU27countries, with about half of those representing ‘high-risk’ groups with sadly poor prognosis. Improved knowledge gained over recent decades and application of cutting-edge technologies have led to huge advances in disease understanding, diagnostics and sub-classification. Despite concerted efforts in recent years trying to expand the landscape of clinical trials available for paediatric brain tumour patients, there are still several hurdles to translating pre-clinical proof-of-concept data into clinically applicable new treatments. As part of BrainTAP, ITCC-P4 will systematically test at least 15 new promising therapeutic approaches on patient-specific laboratory models of childhood tumours in order to generate a comprehensive pre-clinical data package in support of a clinical trial protocol. With that ITCC-P4 helps bridging the gap between initial hypothesis-generating studies and clinical trial initiation.

The European ITCC-BrainTAP programme with centers in Austria, the Netherlands, the UK and Germany, is led by David Jones, head of department at KiTZ and DKFZ. It will be funded with EUR 2 million from the European “Fight Kids Cancer” (FKC) program. FKC is a joint initiative of few European NGOs with the aim to catalyse and accelerate European research that results in innovative and impactful new therapies improving the outcome for all children and adolescents with cancer.