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Despite immense progress in the treatment of childhood cancer, with eight out of 10 children nowadays being cured, there is no room for complacency: childhood cancer remains one of the leading causes of death in children and its treatment comes with significant side effects and severe risks for long-term health.
 
This lecture will discuss today’s challenges and opportunities to improve the treatment of childhood cancer. The future of cancer treatment looks to individualise the treatment according to the specific biology of an individual tumour. Newcastle University has one of the leading childhood cancer research teams in Europe and the lecture will use examples from the team to illustrate how research impacts and improves clinical practice.

Professor Josef Vormoor is a leading childhood leukaemia clinician who holds the Sir James Spence Chair of Child Health at Newcastle University and is Academic Director of the Great North Children’s Hospital. He received his clinical training at the University Children’s Hospital Munster, the largest clinical childhood cancer programme in Germany. His links to the North East go back to 1986 when he came to Newcastle as a medical student, on a one-year exchange placement. It was here that his interest in cancer research arose, through a study project within the Cancer Research Unit (now the Northern Institute for Cancer Research) on ‘the multidrug resistance phenotype in cancer Chemotherapy’. His research is focussed on early clinical trials and childhood leukaemia.