Person of the Week: Mollie Ward, 9, Cancer Crusader

Sept. 17, 2010 — -- Attending Thursday's Congressional Pediatric Cancer Caucus were elected officials, cancer specialists and a 9-year-old girl.

Mollie Ward, the 9-year-old fourth grader from Cherry Hill, N.J., was there to help Dr. Peter Adamson of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia push lawmakers to encourage pharmaceutical companies to research and develop more drugs for children with cancer.

She was diagnosed with a rare cancer in her pancreas before she turned 2.

"I had to have a lot of surgeries and X-rays and [get] a lot of checkups," Mollie said. "You get a lot of shots and you have to go through a lot of things."

Her father, Kevin Ward, said that when Mollie was diagnosed with pancreatoblastoma, they went through the traditional courses of treatment, surgery and chemotherapy, which did not work. After several relapses, her parents were faced with two choices: take her home and prepare to say goodbye or try to find the rare clinical trial.

The Wards traveled to the National Institutes of Health in Maryland for an experimental drug.

"We got the opportunity to try this experimental Phase 1 drug," he said. "It's six or seven years later. ... She is living proof [of] the true essence of the drug, of experimental therapy and the miracle of what she is today."

There are 12,500 new cases of cancer in children every year and 2,500 children die of cancer each year.

Childhood cancers have increased by nearly 30 percent in the last 20 years. Though pediatric cancer kills more children in the United States than any other disease, it makes up only 1 percent of all cancers, said Dr. Howard Katzenstein of the Aflac Cancer Center in Georgia and Emory University.

"When drug companies are developing new drugs, they're really trying to target the widest population, where they're gonna make their money," he said.

Katzenstein said that drugs are first tried in adult patients and then are adapted for children.

The problem? That process can take 10 years and billions of dollars, frustrating doctors and the parents of children with cancer.

The other problem is that there are no medicines that target pediatric cancers, which are different from their adult versions. Because of this lack of new medicines, the cure rate for pediatric cancers is plateauing.

"One of the struggles we deal with is that all the improvements we've made over the last 50 years and that's going from a zero percent cure rate to a close to 80 percent cure rate is that we haven't seen much progress in the last five or 10 years," said Dr. Keith August, a pediatric oncologist at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo.