Childhood and Cancer

There is a saying “Cancer can touch you, but not your soul; neither your thoughts, nor your heart”. It is the leading death causing diseases among children and adolescents in the United States.

Challenges in Childhood Cancer Research:

Childhood cancers represent less than 1% of all new cases of cancer diagnosed in each year. As clinical trials are progressively confined to littler quantities of patients who are characterized by the atomic attributes of their tumours, as opposed to where the tumours started in the body, coordinated effort among kids' malignancy focuses and a solid national clinical research program will keep on being basic to guarantee that trials enlist adequate quantities of members to create significant outcomes.

In addition, the types of cancers children develop, and the biology of those cancers, generally differ from those of cancers diagnosed in adults. For example, tumours of creating organs and tissues, (for example, retinoblastomas in the eye and osteosarcomas in bone) are more typical in kids.

Childhood cancers are often driven by genetic alterations that are distinct from those that occur in adult cancers. As an example, some childhood cancers are initiated by fusion genes resulted from chromosomal translocations which produce "fusion oncoproteins."

Research for Solution

As per the research, the discovery of the CRISPR/Cas system for gene editing has reorganized the study of genes that control cancer cell growth and survival in both childhood and adult cancers. This discovery came from basic research in microbiology on the mechanisms by which bacteria resist infections by viruses.