Tracking Immune Changes In Children with Cancer (TRICICL) version 1.0
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Tracking the Immune Changes In Children with Cancer (TRICICL)
IRAS ID
233593
Contact name
Pamela Kearns
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Birmingham
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 11 months, 29 days
Research summary
Background: Although overall survival rates from childhood cancer have improved significantly over the last few decades, for some types of cancers cure remains challenging. Childhood cancer is still the most common cause of death in children between 0-14 years old. Cytotoxic chemotherapy regimens are central to curative treatment options in most childhood cancers and we know the drugs impact on the immune system in the short term, however the potential longer terms impacts are not understood\n\nAim of the study: We propose to investigate how cytotoxic chemotherapy affects the immune system of children treated for cancer and investigate if drug-induced changes to the immune system influences the response to treatment. Understanding how changes in the immune system are caused by treatment may improve how we use current treatments and also, provide new opportunities to more effectively combine standard chemotherapy drugs with the new, emerging anti-cancer treatments that work by modifying the immune system.Methodology: We propose a prospective study of the immune profile of children diagnosed with solid tumours and children without cancer or immune system disorders attending for elective surgical procedures (control group). Following obtaining informed consent, blood samples from the control group will be collected when the children have their pre-surgical cannulation. For children diagnosed with cancer, blood samples will be collected before treatment is commenced, before each subsequent chemotherapy cycle and at the end of treatment. The different elements of the immune system including effector and suppressive immune cell subsets will be measured using a technique called Cytometry by Time of Flight (CyTOF) that will generate a high-dimensional dataset from the small sample volume available from paediatric patients. The pre-treatment immune profile in childhood cancer patients and how this profile changes in response to standard-of-care therapies will be explored. [COVID-19 amendment 12/05/2020] Given the recent outbreak of COVID-19 virus and the recent manifestation of the paediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome related to COVID-19 we would like to investigate the immune system of these children presenting at Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital with this condition or with symptoms of inflammatory process related or suspected to be due to COVID-19. Given the healthy cohort banked with TRICICL study we believe this is the ideal study to investigate the immune perturbations of these children and compare them to their age matched controls.
REC name
West Midlands - South Birmingham Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/WM/0453
Date of REC Opinion
29 Jan 2018
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion