Role of Hospitals: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

In 2010, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine launched a $65 million, three-year project to sequence the complete normal and cancer genomes of 600 pediatric cancer patients. The goal was to define the genomic landscape of pediatric cancer, including some of the least understood and most challenging cancers. At the time, large-scale sequencing projects focused primarily on adult cancers.

In all, researchers sequenced the complete and normal genomes of about 800 pediatric cancer patients. The project included whole exome and whole transcriptome sequencing of an additional 1,200 patients, which included 23 different cancers.

Over the years, scientists working on the pediatric cancer genome project have pinpointed mutations not previously linked to cancer and published their findings in research journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine.

In 2018, in partnership with DNAnexus and Microsoft, St. Jude launched St. Jude Cloud, an online data-sharing and collaboration platform that gives researchers access to the world’s largest public repository of pediatric genomics data.

Today, the research team continues to investigate childhood cancer and incorporate findings into clinical trials underway at St. Jude, through the Children’s Oncology Group and internationally. The aim of these clinical trials is to improve cure rates and long-term outcomes for several types of childhood cancers.

Read more about St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Pediatric Cancer Genome Project.