NIH awards St. Jude $8.6M to focus on anticancer agent research in children

With its new expansion of the Pharmacogenomics Research Network (PGRN), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded St. Jude Children's Research Hospital a prestigious grant to focus on anticancer agent research in children.

The five-year, $8.6 million grant is titled "PAAR4Kids—Pharmacogenomics of Anticancer Agents Research in Children."

"We've been part of the PGRN for 10 years. But now, we will be the only PGRN group to focus on children, and we are partnering with NCI's Children's Oncology Group. We will be able to comprehensively study children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and we are moving some pharmacogenetic testing into real patient care," said Mary V. Relling, Pharm.D., Pharmaceutical Sciences chair at St. Jude.

A scientist at St. Jude since 1988, Relling's research focuses on pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics in children and how genome variability influences response to cancer chemotherapy.

In support of personalized medicine, the NIH has expanded the PGRN, a nationwide group of scientists focused on understanding how genes affect a person's response to medicines. The NIH estimates it will spend $161.3 million over the next five years to expand the network.

Spearheaded by the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and launched in 2000, the PGRN has already identified gene variants linked to people's responses to medicines for cancer, heart disease, asthma, nicotine addiction and other conditions. The PGRN projects beginning this summer will build on this decade-old foundation and move the PGRN into several new areas: rheumatoid arthritis, bipolar disorder, and rural and underserved populations.