The $300,000 Hyundai Scholar Hope Grant is helping to fund the future of precision medicine in pediatric patients with metastatic sarcoma.

“This can be a very difficult cancer to control with current treatment options. The goal of our project is to be able to match the patient’s specific tumor to the treatment that demonstrates the greatest response in real time,” said the principal investigator, Warren Alperstein, M.D., assistant professor of pediatrics.

The laboratory research will be conducted at the Center for Therapeutic Innovation led by Claes Wahlestedt, M.D., Ph.D. Ines Lohse, Ph.D., is the co-principal investigator for the project. “We believe the multidisciplinary team of physicians and scientists will lay the foundation for the clinical implementation of our precision medicine platform for the treatment stratification of pediatric cancer patients at Sylvester,” Dr. Lohse said.

Researchers will take a piece of each tumor, extract cancer cells, and test 215 FDA-approved drugs to see which ones efficiently kill the individual patient’s cancer cells. They will be using a drug sensitivity testing platform developed at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and supported by Sylvester’s Molecular Therapeutics Shared Resource. This platform has already successfully tested patients with acute myeloid leukemia and is now being applied to sarcoma.

Since 2010, Hyundai Hope On Wheels, a non-profit organization supported by Hyundai and its U.S. dealers, has given Sylvester $700,000 in total research grants.