It’s no secret that although there have been significant advances against certain childhood cancers, new drug development lags behind adult treatments for a large number of pediatric cancers. As identified in in a recently published Newsweek article, pediatric cancers make up less than 1% of all cancers diagnosed annually. Because of these statistics, pharmaceutical companies by and large cannot justify incurring the estimated billions of dollars in out-of-pocket costs necessary to bring new and effective pediatric cancer treatments to market. Although the government has stepped in and the number of pediatric clinical trials has increased, National Cancer Institute funding of pediatric cancer research as a whole has decreased. Thanks to the efforts of organizations like Solving Kids Cancer and other small non-profits, as well as industry led efforts to develop new clinical trial designs that are more cost effective, oncologists have expressed optimism that new pediatric cancer therapies are within reach. For full details about these new clinical trial models as well as the growth of precision medicine and its potential application to pediatric cancer please read the full text of the article here.