Pediatric oncology enters an era of precision medicine

Abstract

With the use of high-throughput molecular profiling technologies, precision medicine trials are ongoing for adults with cancer. Similarly, there is an interest in how these techniques can be applied to tumors in children and adolescents to expand our understanding of the biology of pediatric cancers and evaluate the clinical implications of genomic testing for these patients. This article reviews the early studies in pediatric oncology showing the feasibility of this approach, describe the future plans to evaluate the clinical implications in a multicenter clinical trial and identify the challenges of applying genomics in this patient population.

Keywords: Adolescent and young adult cancer; Genomic profiling; Next-generation sequencing; Pediatric tumors; RNA sequencing; Whole-exome sequencing.