Multi-stakeholder Education Alliance to Accelerate Drug Development for Children and Adolescent with Cancer (ALADDIN)

ended

Over 200,000 children and adolescents are diagnosed with cancer each year globally, 50,000 in Europe and North America. While there has been improvement in survival since the 1970s, the decrease in mortality has reached a plateau – for children with poor-prognosis cancers resistant or refractory to conventional treatment, the survival is less than 25%. Therefore, there is an urgent need for new medicines to cure aggressive tumors, and to reduce the toxicity and sequelae of the treatments. Developing new drugs for children with cancer is a complicated multi-step process with many involved actors (academic researchers, pharmaceutical industry, patient advocates, regulatory authorities, …). There is a need to improve the efficiency of this process and fulfil the unmet needs of children with cancer. To achieve optimal progress, multi-stakeholder collaboration is mandatory. A lack of knowledge and understanding of regulatory processes is a major roadblock to children and adolescents accessing new and beneficial drugs. The aim of this project is to build an innovative, multi-stakeholder and structured framework with an educational program tailored to the needs of the different actors, that is sustainable in the long-term and takes advantage of the expertise and work already initiated by the ACCELERATE platform. The global objectives of the educational program are: 1) To build an educational structure for strategy and regulatory science in pediatric oncology drug development that is sustainable and long-lasting, for future generations of experts to come; 2) To foster and disseminate expertise and to overcome stakeholder’s working in silos and strengthen true multi-stakeholder collaboration. The educational program will be based on four pillars: P1: Course on Strategic/Regulatory Science in Paediatric Oncology Drug Development; P2: 360º Multi-stakeholder rotation; P3: ACCELERATE Research Fellowship; and P4: Online Educational Training Program.