Childhood Cancer Awareness Month: A Primer on Pediatric Cancers With Tristan Knight, MD, FRCPC

In honor of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month in September, Oncology Data Advisor Editorial Board member Dr. Tristan Knight took time to discuss this primer on pediatric cancers, including:

• The story behind Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and the adoption of the gold ribbon to represent it globally
• Biological differences between pediatric and adult cancers
• Types of pediatric cancers, including leukemia, lymphoma, brain and central nervous tumors (CNS)
• Patterns of treatment response in pediatric versus adult cancers
• The importance of making treatment decisions with long-term survivorship in mind
• Emerging trends in clinical trials and research
• The need for increased research funding
• Future directions in genomic testing and survivorship
• And more!

“As more children survive cancers, the importance of funding and conducting research grows, as does the importance of being able to reduce the impact of the chemotherapy that we’re using. A lot of the frontline trials now are looking not so much at expanding treatment, but at scaling back treatment and seeing if you can give less cancer therapy and still have good outcomes.”

About Dr. Knight

Tristan E. Knight, MD, FRCPC, is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA) and practices at Seattle Children’s Hospital. He completed his Pediatric Residency at the University of Hawaii, a Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan, and a Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT)/Cellular Therapy Fellowship at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids). His clinical areas of interest are allogeneic/autologous BMT and cellular/immune effector cell therapy, particularly in the treatment of children with ALL, AML, and neuroblastoma. He has published extensively on novel therapeutic approaches in these conditions, including the use of CAR T-cell therapy in children.