Connecticut Children’s Medical Center has been awarded a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a five-year study on deadly childhood tumors.
The study, led by Connecticut Children’s Executive Vice President and Surgeon-in-Chief Dr. Fernando Ferrer, will investigate a novel approach to treating neuroblastoma, a deadly childhood tumor, by targeting a lipid signaling pathway essential to tumor growth.
Ferrer has been investigating Sphingosine-1 signaling, which promotes the development of solid tumors, and has hypothesized about how the signaling may lead to the growth of tumors. He and his team have been testing how to stop tumor development.
Neuroblastoma is a cancerous tumor that develops from nerve tissue, typically occurring in infants and children. The difficult to treat disease is most commonly identified in children before age five, and occurs in approximately one out of 100,000 children.
