The road to Zero

Although headlines of international conflicts fought for attention throughout 2025 and into the start of 2026, there are other ongoing battles quietly being waged that don’t attract the media attention but certainly should.

The ongoing work of Children’s Cancer Institute and its Zero Childhood Cancer Program (ZERO) is a war against an insidious enemy that effects the most vulnerable in our community and their families, but it is one that continues to deliver life-changing and life-saving results in a quest to irradiate cancer in children and young people for ever.

The Audi Foundation is in its fourth year of partnership with CCI, providing funds to help in ongoing research and clinical trials that have proved so successful in refining its precision medicine approach to individual cancer care and treatment.

Recognised as the world-leading national precision medicine platform, CCI in partnership with the Kids Cancer Centre at Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick, is continuing to transform the very approach to childhood cancer care in Australia, effectively establishing ZERO and precision medicine as the standard of care for Australian children with cancer.

More than 3000 children and young people are currently enrolled in the ZERO program to date, with increased funding allowing the support of additional children with cancer to be able to access the ZERO precision medicine program each year. This forms part of the goal of ultimately embedding the ZERO program into the Australian health system as a permanent, clinically accredited platform.

Late last year Professor Louis Chesler, assumed the position of Executive Director Children’s Cancer Institute, following in the footsteps of the much lauded Professor Michelle Haber AM who was instrumental in the establishment of CCI. He brings extensive experience to the role, having spent the past 17 years leading the Paediatric Oncology Experimental Medicine Centre at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. His work as a clinician researcher – working both as a paediatric oncologist and a laboratory researcher put him in an excellent position to continue the game-changing work of Professor Haber and all those at CCI.

A new facility in the form of the Minderoo Children’s Comprehensive Cancer Centre (MCCCC), represents another first for CCI, placing it now right beside the Kid’s Cancer Centre at Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick, with whom CCI has collaborated so closely for the past four decades.

While not all of CCI’s developments are so visible, its many milestones and achievements are no less significant. As an example, a new tool developed by researchers allows for 3D bioprinted tumour models to rapidly identify the most effective treatments for each child with a solid tumour. In a project led by Professor Maria Kavallaris AM, this new approach allows researchers to produce specific cancers quickly in the lab, allowing them to test drugs for their suitability and reliability.

“The technology we’ve developed is a major advance because it allows us to rapidly grow tumours - including cancers that have been very difficult to grow in the lab in the past - that maintain the features of the original sample, meaning that they are truly representative of the patient’s tumour. This allows us to test for drug sensitivities not only quickly, but with confidence that the results are relevant,” said Professor Kavallaris.

Children’s Cancer Institute researchers are also making inroads against traditionally difficult to treat childhood cancers such as neuroblastoma. Researchers have found that by restricting the neuroblastoma cells access to an amino acid called arginine, the growth of the devastating cancer is significantly impacted.

“Excitingly, we found that if we lowered arginine levels in mice with high-risk neuroblastoma, this substantially extended their survival,” says Associate Professor Jamie Fletcher, co-lead of the study. “It also improved their responses to standard chemotherapy and immunotherapy, with no increased toxicity.”

Breakthroughs have also been made in the fight against deadly brain cancers, developing a new dual-therapy strategy for the treatment of diffuse midline glioma (DMG). Led by Professor David Ziegler and Associate Professor Maria Tsoli, this research targets two critical proteins involved in gene activation to simultaneously switch off thousands of these cancer-driving genes – an approach shown in laboratory studies to not only kill tumours but also significantly extend survival in mice. Crucially, because this work builds on drugs that are currently in clinical development and include one that is already proven safe for use in children, the work creates a clear and accelerated path toward clinical trials and ultimately testing in children with DMG.

These and myriad other ongoing research projects are delivering results that are being converted into effective treatments to combat the many types of cancer afflicting Australian children and young people. Each step takes researchers and clinicians towards the ultimate goal of eradicating  all of these cancers completely – an ongoing battle that goes on quietly behind the headlines.