Riley doctor talks about “cutting-edge” cancer treatment for children

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Doctors say the future of children’s cancer treatment could be in Indianapolis. Riley Hospital for Children is now using Precision Genomics to treat pediatric cancer patients.

Precision Genomics is a highly personalized type of care that has typically been used for adult patients.

Riley has one of the few, if not the only, program in the country that is using this method to treat children with cancer. The program focuses on children whose cancer has come back, children whose cancer is not responding to traditional chemo, or children whose cancer is so serious from the start that doctors know standard treatment won’t work.

A whole team of doctors, researchers and counselors work with each patient. They immediately start with DNA testing, looking at the individual patient genetics and their specific cancer. That allows doctors to get an idea of what medications or treatment will or won’t work from the start. That personalized care gives doctors a better shot at finding an effective approach quickly.

Through that testing, Riley doctors said they’ve found information that helped them fight the child’s tumor in 70 percent of patients so far.

At the same time doctors are caring for the patient with one approach, researchers are trying other treatments on samples of the patient’s tumor in the lab.

“Every patient in the program becomes a research subject…not only to the therapy that we give that child, but to other therapies that we considered. To really allow us to make better and better decisions for each patient as we move forward. So we learn not only from what happens to them clinically, but from a whole menu of treatment options that we try in the lab,” said Dr. Jamie Renbarger.

IU Health has been using this method for adult patients, but Riley just started the children’s program in March. So far, there have been 40 patients. Renbarger said all of those patients have been from Indiana, but now they may be ready to expand the program.

“Given the uniqueness of this program, I do expect that there will be demand we’ll begin to see patients outside of Indiana. We’ve actually made a decision early on to not widely market the program so that we could be sure our processes were working well before we had a larger influx of patients. So we’re at a point where I think we’re ready to begin to announce the fact that we have this program and open our doors to outside the state as well,” said Renbarger.