Pediatric cancer genetics and genomics

At Cohen Children’s, we’re partnering with our community to change the future of cancer care. Using our widespread network, we’ve assembled one of the world’s most diverse databases of DNA profiles from children with cancer and their relatives. Our researchers analyze these findings in order to better understand why some people develop cancer and others do not, why cancer sometimes seems to run in families, and how minor changes in genes and proteins can lead to cancer. This work will not only lead to better pediatric cancer treatments, but will be applied to adult patients across our entire system and beyond.

It has been estimated that 10 to 15 percent of childhood cancer is inherited, so it is critically important to recognize families at risk for recurrent cancers. That’s why we’ve established the Center for Cancer Prevention and Wellness, a unique multidisciplinary and family-centered clinic staffed by genetic counselors and physicians from pediatrics, internal medicine and OB/GYN.

The Center is dedicated to helping people get answers about why cancer may have occurred in their families, and designing personalized cancer prevention and surveillance plans for those at high risk for cancer.  

We are dedicated to getting answers for our families. That’s why we’ve developed the GREAT KIDS (Genomics for Risk Evaluation and Anticancer Therapy in KIDS) Project, an ambitious program to comprehensively investigate every pediatric cancer case at Cohen Children’s. Our goal is to understand why these children developed cancer and how we can best treat them by creating an enormous database of genetic knowledge. Through GREAT KIDS, we:

• Sequence the genomes of all children diagnosed with cancer seen at Cohen Children’s, as well as their families, in order to understand cancer etiology and identify families with unsuspected cancer risk syndromes
• Sequence all tumors within each child in order to identify the genetic changes that lead to treatment failure, so that we can treat them at diagnosis
• Provide access to clinical trials with targeted therapies that are identified through a personalized medicine approach

Learn more about our cancer research, genomic testing and genetic counseling at Northwell Health.