For most of Trevor Weigand’s young life, Akron Children’s Hospital has been his second home.
Since developing health problems at age 4 that were diagnosed as brain cancer a year later, Trevor, now 11, has been in and out of Akron Children’s for surgeries, chemotherapy treatments and hospitalizations.
When his doctors determined his tumors were growing despite standard therapies, the fifth-grader from Alliance recently became the first Akron Children’s patient to get experimental treatments through a new program with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
The partnership between Akron Children’s and Cincinnati Children’s is giving local cancer patients whose disease has relapsed or progressed access to new treatments while allowing them to stay closer to home for most of their care.
Akron Children’s has joined with the Cincinnati Children’s Advanced Cancer Therapies Network to offer cancer patients access to Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials.
Phase 1 trials are the first test in human patients of new drugs to evaluate safety, appropriate doses and side effects on a small scale. Phase 2 trials test to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of new drugs, while Phase 3 trials are larger-scale research efforts to test current best treatments against promising new therapies that may increase cure rates or decrease side effects.
The Akron hospital’s cancer program previously didn’t offer Phase 1 clinical trials and only participated in a limited number of Phase 2 trials.
Care closer to home
Through the network, qualifying Akron Children’s Hospital patients can enroll in cancer research programs and receive the experimental treatments at Cincinnati Children’s. Follow-up care can then be provided closer to home at Akron Children’s, which coordinates with the treatment team in Cincinnati and shares medical records.
“We’re excited to have it here and to be able to offer it for our families,” said Dr. Sarah Rush, a pediatric neuro-oncologist and director of the Akron Children’s Hospital Brain Tumor Program. “I think it gives us a whole array of therapy options we’re able to offer to families that we didn’t offer before.”
The Showers Family Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders at Akron Children’s Hospital diagnoses nearly 100 children with cancer each year.
The partnership with Cincinnati Children’s provides access to research programs to those patients “who have failed the standard treatments,” Rush said. The early phase research studies typically are only available at the nation’s largest cancer centers.
“This is really exciting for me to be able to have access to those studies for my patients,” she said.
For Trevor, the partnership enabled him to enroll in a Phase 2 clinical trial for a new oral chemotherapy drug that targets a protein receptor present on the surface of his cancer cells.
Since February, Trevor has been taking the oral treatment at home and visiting the research team in Cincinnati monthly for evaluations. The medication and evaluations are provided for free through the study.
This week, Trevor will undergo his first MRI in Cincinnati since starting the new treatment to see whether the therapy is shrinking his tumors and keeping them from growing.
His parents, Jodi and Terry, said they appreciate the coordinated program. Through the network, their son gets the treatment he needs while staying at home and continuing school and his activities, including basketball, tae kwon do and Lego construction.
When he recently had a fever, his parents were able to call the doctors at Cincinnati, who made arrangements for him to be treated with an antibiotic in Akron.
“It’s nice to be able to do what we can here, closer to home,” his mother said.
First in network
Akron Children’s is the first of what doctors at Cincinnati Children’s hope will eventually be several hospitals throughout the state to join its Advanced Cancer Therapies Network.
“It is a collaborative group of research centers and hospitals that will work together to conduct multiple trials with novel therapies, the newest therapies that become available,” said Dr. Mariko DeWire, a neuro-oncologist and assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s. “The goal in Ohio is to increase the patient access to new treatment therapies and bone marrow transplants.”
Cincinnati Children’s is one of 11 hospitals nationwide — and the only hospital in Ohio — in the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium (PBTC). The large cancer centers work together to develop clinical trials quickly “so we can make sure these patients have the newest drugs,” DeWire said.
“If we didn’t have this network partnership with Akron Children’s, Trevor would qualify for this study but he would have to stay in Cincinnati,” DeWire said. “He’s able to get the front-line therapy, even though Akron by itself is not a PBTC site.
“It’s kind of like the best of both worlds,” she said. “A patient essentially has two oncology teams working together.”
Cheryl Powell can be reached at 330-996-3902 or cpowell@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow Powell on Twitter at twitter.com/CherylPowellABJ.