My own specialty is neuroblastoma, an often intractable cancer that starts in young nerve cells and can be extremely aggressive. I've been interested in this disease since before medical school, when I had the opportunity to work with noted scientists Drs. Audrey Evans and Britton Chance. I later became convinced that neuroblastoma is a genetic disease, and that we could make critical insights by discovering the genes that cause the cancer.
To learn more and make a difference as quickly as possible, I developed a laboratory and translational research program at Children's Hospital to help us focus on the genetic abnormalities in hereditary and sporadic neuroblastoma. We strive to be the world’s leading neuroblastoma research and treatment center as we work to exponentially increase our understanding of this cancer and its underlying biology. Our challenge is to impact clinical practice — an effort we approach with urgency and a large measure of recent success. In the past few years, our team at Children's Hospital has been able to identify the main genes associated with this cancer. As a result, we moved some of these discoveries toward new therapies, a number of which are now in clinical trials.