Pediatric cancers face slow therapeutic progress due to biological differences and economic factors, impacting thousands of children annually.
Pediatric cancer treatments lag behind adult innovations
In the field of pediatric cancers, therapeutic innovations are few. The differences between childhood and adult cancers partially explain this situation, but this is not the main reason. The economic model of the pharmaceutical sector and current regulations are also to blame.Adult cancer treatments advance rapidly
Major advances have occurred in the management of many adult cancers, including early diagnosis, new drugs different from chemotherapy, and innovative and more effective surgical and radiotherapy techniques. Unfortunately, these therapeutic innovations arrive only very slowly in children and adolescents.Biological differences contribute to the delay
The reasons for this delay are partly biological, because childhood cancers are very different from adult cancers. In children, there is no breast, lung, prostate, or colon cancer. Nevertheless, there are more than 60 different pediatric cancers, the most common being leukemias and brain tumors.High incidence of pediatric cancers in France
Each year in France, 2,300 children and adolescents under the age of 18 are diagnosed with cancer. The most common are leukemias (650 cases per year) and brain tumors (550 cases per year).
