St. Jude, World Health partner in cancer fight
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is partnering with the World Health Organization in the next phase of the Memphis-based hospital’s quest to battle childhood cancer on a global scale.
The St. Jude-WHO collaboration was set for discussion Sept. 27-28 in New York City at the United Nations General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on Noncommunicable Diseases and during a side event on childhood cancer.
The partnership builds on St. Jude Global, an initiative launched in May with a $100 million investment. That effort aims at accelerating efforts to improve childhood cancer survival rates worldwide. It set a 10-year goal of reaching 30 percent of the world’s children with cancer or other life-threatening diseases, compared to the current 3 percent.
Now, the hospital has a “moral obligation” to try to expand its worldwide reach even further, said Dr. James R. Downing, St. Jude’s president and CEO. Through the collaboration, it hopes to cure at least 60 percent of children worldwide with the six most common kinds of cancer by 2030.
“We think this may be one of the most important things we ever do at St. Jude,” Downing said.
The newest initiative with WHO will offer the hospital’s technical support and $15 million in seed money to further the global outreach effort and to build on St. Jude founder Danny Thomas’ vision that “no child should die in the dawn of life.”
“While we have been able to advance this vision for many children with cancer,” Downing said, “the bitter reality is
that in most places around the world, four out of five children with cancer are still dying of their disease.”
By contrast, the cure rate in developed countries is now 80 percent.
St. Jude plans through the initiative to support clinical care for the most vulnerable children and strengthen training programs by developing centers of excellence and regional satellite facilities. The plan also calls for working to influence the integration of childhood cancer into national policies, ensuring a greater chance of survival for affected children.
Trying to help improve survival rates outside the U.S. is not new for St. Jude. For the past two-plus decades, the hospital through its International Outreach Program invested in local programs in countries with limited resources to improve the quality of care and outcomes.
“It was a great program,” Downing said. “It was based on a ‘twinning’ concept, where we would go to a single hospital in a single country and we would work with that hospital to help them build to treat children with cancer. But that had gone as far as it could go. We found it wasn’t scalable worldwide.”
The St. Jude Global initiative was announced in May and now the WHO collaboration will intensify the cancerfighting effort and even, Downing said, improve the chances for children no matter what disease they have.
“It will not only change the landscape for pediatric cancer but by doing this at a global scale will actually change the infrastructure for the care of children,” he said. “We’ll be improving ICU’s around the world, we’ll be developing centers of excellence, we’ll allow people to move out of their countries and go to other countries to learn specialized training, we’ll set up diagnostic networks.”
Carlos Rodriguez-Galindo, executive vice president and chair of the St. Jude Department of Global Pediatric Medicine, said the WHO collaboration means researchers will be able to move more quickly in getting advances in treatment to places where it is most needed.
“We have exciting opportunities to harness efforts happening worldwide to more quickly advance children’s access to quality cancer care and ensure that fewer young lives are needlessly cut short by treatable diseases,” RodriguezGalindo said in a statement.
The plan grew out of a 2017 World Health Assembly resolution on cancer prevention and control. As WHO officials began looking for partners in the effort to address childhood cancers specifically, Downing said WHO was pointed in the direction of St. Jude. WHO had already, in March, named St. Jude its first WHO Collaborating Centre for Childhood Cancer.
“With commitment and collaboration, the care and outcomes for children with cancer can be improved,” Svetlana Akselrod, WHO’s assistant directorgeneral for noncommunicable diseases and mental health said. “Therefore, taking action against childhood cancer represents one of the most effective and tangible steps in the broader fight against noncommunicable disease.”
On another subject, Downing during an interview gave an update on construction at St. Jude’s downtown campus.
He said work on the 625,000-squarefoot advanced research center, a major piece in a $1 billion capital expansion announced two years ago, is “moving fantastically.”
Pilings are in place, the interior has been designed, and Downing said the project is on schedule for its 2021 completion date.
“You’re going to start seeing it come out of the ground soon,” Downing said.
He also said ground will be broken in the next 3-5 months on a new housing facility, providing 140-plus new rooms for patients along with a full-service cafeteria.
Planning is in the early planning stages for a new outpatient building and clinical office building. Downing said that project is now in design, and it will probably be about a year before pictures are available.