Inside Pediatrics Fall/Winter 2024

The Benefits for Alabama and Beyond For children in Alabama with cancer, the new clinical trials are game-changing. Previously, patients may have had to travel out of state or even to another part of the country to access the trials they needed. “And that was only accessible for some families who have the resources to do it,” Dhall said. “For a large number of our patients, that was not possible.”

even beyond Alabama. Dhall says patients come from Mississippi, Louisiana, North Florida and other parts of the Gulf Coast region for the trials. The hospital even gets referrals from other countries. “The impact of having access to these clinical trials is great for this region,” he said. “It’s a good challenge to have to accommodate all those patients and provide access. So I think it’s been great not just locally, but regionally as well.”

Now, those children have access to the same clinical trials without having to leave the state. That’s big

Jaxan’s Story For Jaxan Jernigan and his family, the new clinical trials are already paying off. When he was 6 years old, he began experiencing headaches and seizures. At the local hospital in Pensacola, Florida, doctors discovered a large brain tumor. After a 14-hour surgery, they determined it was a high-grade aggressive tumor called a CNS embryonal tumor. At Children’s, Dhall was leading the Head Start 4 Clinical Trial—one of the new trials added through his expansion efforts. Jaxan’s parents agreed to have him receive therapy on this trial, and he went through five rounds of intensive chemotherapy and three stem cell transplants followed by 30 days of brain and spinal irradiation. Nearly eight months later, Jaxan was considered to be in remission. Today, he’s back to an active life. “We owe so much of that to Dr. Dhall and the entire staff at Children’s,” Jaxan’s dad, Craig, said.

Head Start and Other Trials The Head Start trial (mentioned in Jaxan’s Story above) is just one example of the opportunities Dhall brought. It opened in 1990 and is currently in its fourth iteration, now involving more than 60 institutions across the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. Dhall is a national co-chair of the study. “The idea behind Head Start is to give high-dose or intensive chemotherapy up front so that we can either avoid whole-brain irradiation completely for these infants and young children and/or be able to give really reduced dose and volume of irradiation,” Dhall said, “and keeping in mind that we want to

maintain the survival that we see with irradiation, but with much less long-term side effects.”

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