Cancers Selected for Study

The Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET) Initiative seeks to identify the genomic changes associated with the following childhood cancers:

• Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) – A fast-growing type of blood cancer in which too many immature white blood cells are found in the blood and bone marrow.
• Neuroblastoma – Cancer of cells of the sympathetic nervous system.

ALL and neuroblastoma, two common types of childhood cancer, account for more than 3,000 childhood cancer cases in the United States each year.

In addition to their prevalence, ALL and neuroblastoma were selected as the initial focus for the TARGET Initiative because of the need to improve treatment options for many children with these diagnoses, ongoing NCI-supported efforts to molecularly characterize these cancers, and the availability of clinically annotated, high-quality human tissue collections that met TARGET's strict scientific, technical, and ethical requirements.

In both ALL and neuroblastoma, there are some children who have a quite favorable prognosis and other children with unfavorable disease characteristics who are at high risk of treatment failure. TARGET aims to uncover the genomic factors that distinguish these two groups, so that researchers can rapidly develop treatments that provide better outcomes for patients with high-risk disease, as well as finding better, more targeted treatments for all who suffer from these diseases.