For decades, children with solid tumors have had few new treatment options, even as cancer care has advanced dramatically for adults. Now, Children's National Hospital is launching a first-of-its-kind clinical trial designed to tackle one of the biggest challenges in pediatric cancer: tumors that adapt quickly and evade single-target therapies. The effort was recently highlighted in The Washington Post, underscoring both the scientific challenge and the urgency facing families.

Led by Catherine Bollard, MD, MBChB, the trial uses each child's own T cells, engineered to attack two tumor targets at the same time. "Cancers are really clever," Dr. Bollard explained. "And one of the ways they get clever is they get rid of one of their targets." If the cancer cells detect that a treatment like T cells is focusing on one target, she said, "then the cancer cell can just go, 'Okay, I'm going to get rid of that target.' But because our product is targeting two, it's much harder for the tumor cell to catch up and delete them both."

The study is part of the global Cancer Grand Challenges initiative and reflects years of work to move an idea from the lab to the clinic. While the trial is intentionally small, researchers say even early signs of success could help shift the field and offer new hope to children and families facing cancers where progress has been far too slow.