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(Vienna, 9.8.2023) Scientists at St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute and the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen have shown that immunotherapy after stem cell transplantation effectively combats certain nerve tumors in children. Crucially, stem cells from a parent provide children with a new immune system that responds much better to immunotherapies. These results of an early clinical trial were published in the prestigious Journal of Clinical Oncology.

With a novel High-Throughput-Screening method the efficacy of numerous drugs can be tested simultaneously. Researchers are now able to quickly and efficiently assess which substances are effective against certain tumors. A team led by Martin Distel, PhD, and Sabine Taschner-Mandl, PhD, of St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute has now provided the first guide on how to use this method to test the sensitivity of childhood tumors to different drugs in zebrafish models. The study was published in the Journal npj Precision Oncology.

Scientists led by Sabine Taschner-Mandl, PhD, St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute, and Nikolaus Fortelny, PhD, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, are the first to analyze bone marrow metastases from childhood tumors of the nervous system using modern single-cell sequencing analysis. It turns out that cancer cells prevent cells in their environment from fighting the tumor – a process that could be reversed with medication. The findings were published in the renowned journal Nature Communications.

Prof. Florian Grebien, PhD, is eager to understand why some childhood leukemias show poor treatment response and how this can be tackled. To this end, he is now establishing his own team at St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute (St. Anna CCRI). “Prof. Grebien is an outstanding researcher. We have followed his scientific achievements for many years and are very pleased to have been able to recruit him as a Principal Investigator to St. Anna CCRI,” says Prof. Kaan Boztug, MD, Scientific Director of St. Anna CCRI.

(Vienna, 29.4.2023) Today is International Day of Immunology – a day to raise awareness for the importance of immunology. A recent study from St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute reveals the association between an impaired immune system and the susceptibility to viral infections and cancer in a young patient.

A combination therapy against childhood bone cancer is efficient in living organisms: if the tumor is transplanted into fish larvae and treated with certain drugs, it shrinks significantly or disappears completely. However, the journey will still take a while before these drugs can be applied in children, say Martin Distel, PhD, from St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute and co-authors. The results were published in the journal Cancer Letters.

A study in collaboration with St. Anna CCRI shows that stem cell transplantation does not provide any advantage over chemotherapy in a specific form of leukemia.

Ana Kutschat selected for training program by EHA and EMBL-EBI (Vienna, 21.12.2022) The European Hematology Association (EHA) and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) selected Ana Kutschat, postdoc in Davide Seruggia´s research group at St. Anna Children´s Cancer Research Institute (St. Anna CCRI) as one of only 20 favored young scientists to participate in the 2023

St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute and its collaboration partner CeMM receive funding for a project aimed at providing tailored treatments for a type of childhood leukemia not adequately addressed by current therapy.

Prof. Christina Peters, MD, from St. Anna Children’s Hospital and St. Anna CCRI presents new data showing a dire need for immunotherapy strategies tackling high-risk childhood leukemia at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH). Other updates from the same study (FORUM) confirm the superiority of total body irradiation prior to stem cell transplantation and the use of transplants from matched unrelated donors in children under the age of four with high-risk acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).

How adult drugs from the group of MAP kinase inhibitors can also be used in children with cancer in a standardized manner worldwide has now been outlined in a statement in the renowned European Journal of Cancer. The authors of this review are stakeholders from all relevant fields, including Caroline Hutter, MD, PhD, scientist at St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute, clinician at St. Anna Children’s Hospital and expert in the rare pediatric cancer Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH). Her goal is to test the most effective and tolerable MAP kinase inhibitor in a clinical trial, thus enabling rapid market approval and availability for children.

St. Anna CCRI attends “Better Medicines for Children Conference 2022” (Vienna, 20.10.2022) We are happy to attend the “EFGCP Better Medicines for Children Conference 2022” with Ruth Ladenstein (Principal Investigator at St. Anna CCRI) presenting the EU funded “European Rare Disease Research Coordination and Support Action – ERICA” in the panel discussion “Rare diseases –

A great success! Dr. Eva König, principal investigator at St. Anna CCRI, is honored with the Heribert-Konzett-Prize of the Austrian Pharmacological Society (APHAR) for her scientific work on the interaction between immune and cancer cells. The prize is awarded to recognize the achievements of young scientists already conducting independent research in the field of experimental and clinical pharmacology and to encourage their further development.