Today, Logan Jenner is a healthy, happy 8-year-old who jumps tirelessly on his trampoline, dreams of visiting Hawaii and plans to tackle every sport imaginable — from basketball and soccer to surfing and snowboarding.
Once, he was Patient 13: a case of relapsed acute myeloid leukemia.
Logan was part of a small, diverse group of children with various advanced, relapsed pediatric cancers who took part in Diana Azzam's clinical trial conducted in collaboration with Nicklaus Children's Hospital and funded by the Florida Department of Health Live Like Bella Pediatric Cancer Research Initiative. Each one of them lacked treatment options and time. They were in desperate need of new alternatives to attack aggressive tumors.
The hope: A treatment of last resort might be found by Azzam and her team at the FIU Robert Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work.
In a race against the clock, Azzam's lab became the first to successfully guide personalized treatments for some of the deadliest, hard-to-treat children's cancers through a unique functional precision medicine approach.
The process involves small samples of a patient's tumor rush-delivered straight to Azzam's campus lab. Cancer cells are enriched and processed in the lab in a way that closely resembles how they would normally grow in the body. Then, they're exposed to over 120 FDA-approved drugs, including both cancer and non-cancer drugs like statins and allergy medications. The best cancer destroyers are singled out. The entire process takes around a week.
According to study results, published in Nature Medicine, this approach provided safe and readily accessible, effective and affordable options for patients without other alternatives. Most important, those recommendations impacted the children — 83% showed improvement, including Logan.
"In this feasibility study, we were able to show what works in the lab works on a patient's tumor," says Azzam, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences and Society for Functional Precision Medicine board member. "I hope the more data we generate we'll be able to convince more physicians that functional precision medicine should be used — not only as a treatment of last resort, but first choice."
To the point
- Nature Medicine study shows a promising new approach can help guide more timely, effective cancer treatments.
- For the first time, researchers combined genetic testing with personalized drug screening on tumor samples to identify the right treatment for children with relapsed cancers.
- This unique functional precision medicine approach led to 83% of patients showing improvement, including Logan Jenner, whose relapsed leukemia was successfully treated through Azzam's new guided approach.
