Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital Joins International Children’s Brain Tumor Network to Accelerate Research and Advance Care for Kids
Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital has become the newest member institution of the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN), a prestigious, international collaborative research effort aimed at accelerating treatments for children with brain tumors.
Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital now is among 34 institutions worldwide that have enrolled more than 7,700 study participants and more than 78,000 biospecimen samples to create the world’s most comprehensive repository of childhood brain tumors.
CBTN’s suite of informatics and analytics platforms enables researchers to collaborate in real-time on behalf of children diagnosed with a brain tumor.
The hospital’s CBTN principal investigators are Samuel Cheshier, MD, pediatric neurosurgeon, and Nicholas Whipple, MD, pediatric neuro-oncologist, at Huntsman Cancer Institute at University of Utah and Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital.
“Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital is excited to join with the Children’s Brain Tumor Network to advance care for children and young adults diagnosed with brain and central nervous system tumors,” said Dr. Cheshier.
“We’re grateful to join with other CBTN member institutions as we work to improve the standard of care for children and their families, including here in the Intermountain West,” added Dr. Whipple.
As a participating CBTN member site, Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital contributes consented samples of childhood tissue to improve understanding of brain tumor biology.
Each study sample is deidentified before undergoing genetic sequencing, a process that converts the donated tissue into data to provide the greatest value to researchers worldwide, while protecting the privacy of each child.
No single institution can collect enough samples on its own, making collaboration through CBTN an essential step towards more effective treatments for children.
Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital is the pediatric specialty teaching hospital of the University of Utah Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine and the flagship pediatric hospital for Intermountain Health, caring for more than 100 newly diagnosed children with brain and central nervous system tumors every year.
The hospital currently has more than 1,000 active studies, including approximately 250 clinical trials. Pediatric neuro-oncology and neurosurgery services currently have 48 IRB-approved clinical trials open to enrollment.
“We extend a warm welcome to Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital as a new CBTN member institution,” said co-executive chair Sabine Mueller, MD, PhD, MAS, CBTN. “Adding the expertise of Intermountain Primary Children’s in clinical trial management, along with their excellence in interdisciplinary research supports CBTN’s efforts to create better futures for the kids we treat.”
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