Stratified Medicine Paediatrics 2

Children who relapse after cancer therapy often run out of treatment options because doctors lack precise tests to match them with the right drugs. StratMedPaeds2 will develop new molecular tests to identify which treatments might work for these children, building on an earlier programme that already delivered several effective tests to the NHS. The problem is that current tests can miss important treatment targets or fail to explain why a child’s cancer stopped responding to therapy. This project will address four specific issues that limit how well existing tests guide clinical decisions. If successful, the new tests will give clinicians and researchers actionable information about mechanisms of treatment failure, helping them choose more effective therapies for individual children. That could improve survival rates for children with relapsed cancer—a group that currently has very few good options. The work is applied, not fundamental science: it aims to produce tests that can be adopted directly by the NHS, not just knowledge for its own sake.