ACCELERATE Initiative: An international approach to accelerating innovative cancer therapies
About ACCELERATE
ACCELERATE, a non-profit organization launched in 2015 under Belgian law, is a transparent discussion forum that tackles overarching issues in the development of new anticancer medicines for children and adolescents.
ACCELERATE offers a unique approach to working out answers to some of the most vexing challenges in childhood cancer. In contrast to conventional medical/scientific platforms, ACCELERATE engages the full range of stakeholders in a deliberate problem-solving approach to advance pediatric oncology drug development. Pediatric Strategy Forums and Annual Conferences with working groups involve scientific discussion focused on novel therapeutic alternatives and barriers to more rapid access for children to new oncology drugs. Consensus recommendations and action plans are formulated about how to improve treatment.
U.S. Representation on Steering Committee
Susan L. Weiner, Founder of Children's Cancer Cause, is one of the U.S. representatives on the ACCELERATE Steering Committee.
The Steering Committee has been working to increase U.S. awareness about ACCELERATE. Dr. Gilles Vissal, ACCELERATE Chair and Director of Clinical Research at Gustave Roussy, presented a webinar, hosted by Coalition Against Childhood Cancer in December 2019. The webinar, which reviews the current drug development landscape and the ACCELERATE initiative, is available on the CAC2 website.
Pictured at left: Susan Weiner at the February 2020 ACCELERATE meeting in Brussels, Photo Credit: SIOP Europe
ACCELERATE’s U.S. Strategy Forums:
2020 in Philadelphia: Epigenetic Modifiers in Children and Adolescents
ACCLERATE’s first U.S. Pediatric Strategy Forum was held in Philadelphia, January 2020, and reviewed novel epigenetic modifiers most likely to be major drivers in childhood and adolescent cancers.
Companies presented the pediatric relevance of drugs in their pipelines to researchers, clinicians, biopharmaceutical companies, regulators and patient advocates, who openly discussed agents’ therapeutic potential.
Mutations in chromatin associated proteins or transcription factors are major causes of childhood cancer and epigenetic modifiers reprogram cancer cells. The Forum made plans how to best develop these new drugs in the future to give the children the best chance of benefitting from them
Previous Forums held in the EU addressed ALK inhibitors, mature B-cell malignancies, and immune checkpoint inhibitor combinations, among other topics.
2023 in Boston: PI3K/AKT/mTOR Pathway Inhibitors
The 11th Multi-Stakeholder Pediatric Strategy Forum (PSF) was held at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in April 2023 in collaboration with the European Medicines Agency and with participation of the Food and Drug Administration. The PSF focused on new agents in development and their potential role to inhibit PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathways important to pediatric cancers. Children's Cancer Cause was proud to be a sponsor of the Forum.
Children's Cancer Cause founder Susan L. Weiner participated in the PSF, offering advocates’ views on the themes discussed. Her remarks emphasized the need for tighter communication among academic researchers to ensure sufficient numbers of patients could participate in trials for rare pediatric cancers.
Research needs to plan treatments beyond early clinical trials, taking account of a drug’s ‘lifespan’ in a company and its potential for novel/novel combination therapies. Susan emphasized that preclinical models may yield data that are disease specific, especially for pediatric brain tumors.
On becoming a patient advocate:
“Some parents, after losing a child to cancer, become patient advocates and engage skills from their prior lives to support progress in paediatric oncology research.
For me, research training steered my subsequent life to try to affect the complexities of developing new cancer drugs for children. It was clear to me that improving children’s access to modern therapies depended on close scientific partnerships and not on market forces.”
- Susan Weiner
