NYU Langone Health’s Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital officialized its place in the Children’s Brain Tumor Network, a global consortium of research institutions, earlier this month — marking the medical center’s latest step toward advancing pediatric cancer research. 

Through the partnership specialists at NYU Langone and other CBTN affiliates offer child patients and their families the opportunity to donate brain and spinal cord tumor samples, enabling the network to accumulate more biodata than would have been possible at any individual institution. Dr. Jessica Clymer, the director of the pediatric neuro-oncolomoregy program at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital, will serve as CBTN’s principal investigator at NYU Langone. 

“My team and I at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital are thrilled to collaborate with other CBTN institutions as we unite our efforts to advance pediatric brain tumor research and provide the best care for our patients and families,” Clymer said in the press release.

The CBTN is the world’s largest center dedicated to collecting pediatric brain tumor samples, with 34 member institutions across seven countries including China, Italy and Switzerland, and affiliations with colleges such as Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University. Since the network commenced in 2008, its institutions have collected around 75,000 biosamples of brain and spinal cord tumor tissue from over 7,600 patients.  

In 2019, the Making Headway Foundation — a nonprofit aimed at supporting families of children diagnosed with brain or spinal cord tumors — partnered with the CBTN and Hassenfield Children’s Hospital to create a new position dedicated to managing pediatric brain tumor sampling. Daniel Lipka, the executive director of the Making Headway Foundation, also said that the organization has been financially supporting NYU’s collection of brain and spinal cord tumor tissue since 2005. 

“I am hopeful that in the short term, these precious tissues from these kids will go to places that will really appreciate and utilize them in research,” Lipka said in an interview with WSN. “In the long term, I hope that NYU will be part of growing collaborations of hospitals in this country and around the world that work together to find better treatments.”

Contact Lekhya Kantheti at [email protected].