DETROIT — Even in the midst of a pandemic, Children’s Hospital of Michigan is working hard to help children with cancer.

Children’s Hospital of Michigan, part of the Detroit Medical Center, has been selected as the only hospital in the Midwest to collaborate with St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital on a new precision medicine study aimed at increasing leukemia and lymphoma survival rates while reducing side effects.

The Total 17 study is the 17th trial in the series designed to save more children while improving their quality of life during treatment and beyond.

As the largest clinical trial ever run by St. Jude, Total 17 aims to treat 1,000 children requiring the collaboration of institutions throughout the U.S. and beyond.

Children’s Hospital of Michigan is one of four centers in the country and six in the world to collaborate on this study and has started to enroll patients in the trial.

Jeffrey Taub, MD, division chief of Oncology and principal investigator of the Total 17 study at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, says this important study incorporates precision medicine using genetic factors to tailor therapy.

“Genes can predispose children to cancer or regulate medication response. Every child who enrolls in Total 17 will undergo genomic testing of both normal tissue and leukemia cells to guide therapy,” says Dr. Taub.

“Besides leukemia cases being diagnosed at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, we also send samples to St. Jude for further analysis. For the TOTAL17 protocol, patients can receive several days of treatment somewhere else and potentially come to Children’s Hospital of Michigan and switch to being treated on the TOTAL17 protocol. We also have the AML16 protocol in collaboration with St. Jude for patients with acute myeloid leukemia,” he adds.

Eligibility for study participants:

The study is for newly diagnosed acute lymphoblastic leukemia and acute lymphoblastic lymphoma (blood cell cancers) often known as ALL and LLy (both B-cell and T-cell).

• 1 to 18 years old
• No prior therapy or limited prior therapy (systemic glucocorticoids for one week or less, one dose of vincristine, emergency radiation therapy (e.g., to the mediastinum, head and neck, orbit, etc.) and one dose of intrathecal chemotherapy)
• Patients in this clinical trial will be treated in three stages over approximately 2½ years