Inside Pediatrics Fall/Winter 2024

Other Trials

Matthew Kutny, M.D., was named director of the Children’s of Alabama Pediatric Clinical Trials Office in 2022.

Just in the last couple of years, researchers involved in Head Start have seen big results. At an international conference in Philadelphia in 2024, Dhall reported on a group of patients with a sub-type of Grade 4 brain tumors, i.e., SHH-activated medulloblastoma. Using the Head Start treatment strategy, doctors were able to cure more than 95% of the patients without using radiation therapy to the brain, Dhall said. “So that actually moves the field significantly forward,” he added.

“ We want to maintain the survival that we see with irradiation, but with much less long-term side effects.

the Children’s Pediatric Clinical Trials Office—a role Dhall held until he turned it over to Kutny in 2022. Since then, Kutny has continued to build the program and seen a lot of exciting developments, including the move toward targeted therapy and immunotherapy. These can allow patients, when possible, to avoid chemotherapy, which can damage healthy cells in the process of killing cancer cells. Targeted therapies zero in on the changes that occurred in the cells to make them cancerous. Kutny says these treatments have been successful against leukemia and solid tumors. Immunotherapy, on the other hand, engages a child’s immune system to fight off cancer as if it were an infection. “There are several exciting immunotherapy research projects that we’ve been able to participate in and lead here in Alabama,” Kutny said.

More than 95% of the patients in the study were able to be cured without using radiation to the brain.

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Treating brain tumors is just one of the program’s focal points. The hospital also has teams that specialize in blood disorders, leukemia and lymphoma, solid tumors such as kidney and liver cancer and more.

“So you can imagine the breadth of the trials that are involved,” said Matthew Kutny, M.D., director of

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Inside Pediatrics | Children’s of Alabama