Cassie Kline

Adamantiomatious craniopharyngioma (ACP) is an intracranial tumor with no currently available targeted drug therapeutics. Using cell lines provided by the Children’s Brain Tumor Network, researchers will develop new models for use in identifying therapeutic opportunities for this disease.

The recently characterized molecular marker, histone H3 K27M, could prove important to the treatment of pediatric gliomas. Researchers will interrogate data from the Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas in order to better understand this new class of malignant gliomas.

In November 2020, the FDA released guidance to help promote clinical trial enrollment practices that could lead to clinical trials that better reflect diverse populations who may benefit from treatments, medical devices, or drugs that are being investigated. Despite previous efforts, there remain gaps in inclusion of under-represented populations in many clinical trials. One of the barriers to being inclusive among all groups are the languages that are offered for informed consent practices. Currently, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and collaborating institutions typically offer multilingual staff and informed consents in limited languages. But, the options available at each site vary and can be costly and burdensome at the level of each individual institution/clinical research team. Our goal is to remove this potential barrier by providing consortium level informed consents and study documents in multiple languages to ensure enrollment and recruitment of under-represented minorities (URM) in languages understood by a diverse population of patients and families. By providing these necessary resources, non-English speaking patients and families will be afforded the same opportunity to understand and participate in clinical trial enrollments as English-speaking patients and families.