Zero Childhood Cancer (ZERO) builds upon an almost 40-year history of translational research collaboration between Children’s Cancer Institute and the Kids Cancer Centre at Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick, the laboratory and clinical Program leaders, respectively. The strength and power of this translational pipeline between the Institute and our clinical colleagues have been showcased in back-to-back articles in The Lancet (381:1804-4 and 381: 1807-7, 2013), highlighting this partnership as an exemplar of how child cancer translational research should be conducted on the international stage.
ZERO is a true multidisciplinary team effort of researchers and clinicians and includes all nine of Australia’s children’s hospitals together with 19 national and international research partners.
ZERO is open at every major paediatric oncology centre in Australia who provide treatment to the 1000+ children and adolescents diagnosed with cancer every year. Since the ZERO national clinical trial opened in September 2017, over 900 children with high-risk cancer have been enrolled and the results to date have been remarkable. Following the success of the first national clinical trial, which has now been running for over five years, ZERO has entered a phase of expansion with the aim of becoming available to all children and young people (0-18 years) diagnosed with cancer in Australia−regardless of their cancer type or risk profile − by the end of 2023.
The expansion of the trial has been made possible as a result of funding support by the Australian Government’s Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) and the Minderoo Foundation’s Collaborate Against Cancer Initiative, announced in April 2020.
ZERO’s research and clinical partners include all nine of Australia’s children’s hospitals, as well as 19 national and international research partners.
The Australian ZERO research partners represent subject matter expertise across all areas of medical research, from discovery biology to health implementation research. ZERO has actively sought and nurtured collaborations with key experts in areas of greatest need to accelerate the translation of research into children’s cancer care.
Internationally, ZERO has established strong collaborations in the field of paediatric cancer research with a shared goal of accelerating progress through knowledge exchange and research partnerships.
These partnerships will continue to drive research progress in areas of greatest need for children with cancer, and ZERO will actively pursue new partnerships to drive the research objectives of this program.
All research and clinical partners
New South Wales
Victoria
Medical Research Institutes
- Australian Biocommons, University of Melbourne
- Australian Genome Research Facility (AGRF)
- Hudson Institute of Medical Research
- Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI)
- Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre
- Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research
- Victorian Clinical Genetics Sevices (VCGS), Royal Children's Hospital
Hospitals
South Australia
Medical Research Institutes
Hospitals
Queensland
Hospitals
Western Australia
Medical Research Institutes
Hospitals
International
Medical Research Institutes
- Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Kids First Initiative, PA, USA
- DKFZ (German Cancer Research Centre), Heidelberg Germany
- Institut Curie, Paris, France
- Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland, University of Helsinki, Finland
- Princess Maxima Center for Pediatric Oncology, Ultrect, Netherlands
- St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, TN, USA
- Terry Fox PROFYLE, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), Canada
- University of Cambridge (Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute), UK
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