Spence Family Sarcoma Fund- TumorGlow

 Family and Friends,

In 2021 we became intimately aware from our journey with Callan, that surgical chest resection for sarcoma is an exceptionally complex procedure, one that few hospitals and surgical teams are adequately equipped to undertake. It took a remarkable team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), led by esteemed surgeons, Stephanie Fuller, MD, and Peter Mattei, MD, to successfully excise Callan’s tumor with negative margins — providing our family with an intervention that few are privileged to receive.

The most common location that sarcomas relapse or spread is to the lungs. The surgical removal of these metastases presents another complicated procedure. While surgeons universally strive to achieve negative margins and diligently identify all metastases, they are constrained by the limitations of the tools currently available- their eyes and hands.

Over the next five years, CHOP, in partnership with the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP), hopes to address these challenges by launching a pediatric clinical trial for TumorGlow, an intraoperative molecular imaging technology that uses injectable dyes to “light up” tumors under near-infrared light. TumorGlow depends on two innovations: a fluorescent contrast agent that is injected into the patient and accumulates in the tumor tissues, and an imaging system that can detect and quantify the contrast agent in the tumor tissues.

Sunil Singhal, MD, and others at HUP have demonstrated that TumorGlow improves intraoperative detection of solid tumors, lymph nodes containing metastatic cancer cells and satellite tumor deposits. When the tumor cells “glow” during surgery, the surgeons are more easily able to identify tumor margins, residual disease, positive lymph nodes and additional satellite metastases. This state-of-the-art technology can help CHOP surgeons ensure negative margins and detection of all lung metastases.

Fundraising Goal: $1M

• Clinical trial personnel support: $750K
• Indocyanine green (TumorGlow drug): $5,000 per/patient, ~$100K
• Correlative biology studies: $150K

Bringing Breakthroughs to Pediatric Sarcoma Patients

While TumorGlow is already an FDA-approved drug, it has yet to be approved or widely used for sarcomas. It has not been studied in children at the dose Dr. Singhal has identified for adult patients.

Your support will enable us to launch a study of HUP’s TumorGlow at CHOP. The CHOP pilot will aim to enroll 20 pediatric patients (under 18) over 5 years with either a primary sarcoma in the chest or lung metastases from sarcoma. Enrolled subjects will receive an infusion of indocyanine green (TumorGlow) the day prior to surgery. Then, patients will then undergo standard-of-care surgery with the addition of fluorescence imaging. During the surgery, the fluorescence from the tumor will be used to localize lesions and ensure the entire tumor has been removed, as well as locate any unexpected tumors. At the end of CHOP’s trial, we aim to demonstrate that this dose of TumorGlow is safe in children and that it facilitates better surgeries – identification of tumor nodules and clean margins.

This trial will run concurrently with a five year, phase three randomized clinical trial for adults at HUP. HUP’s adult study has been designed with input from the FDA to definitively prove whether TumorGlow can improve surgical outcomes. In order to increase access for all pediatric patients who could benefit from this intervention, the CHOP team will elect to do a nonrandomized trail in children.

These two complementary approaches will generate critical data on survival, as well as data that is urgently needed on the efficacy of TumorGlow in children with sarcomas. If this trial is successful, the CHOP team – and your family and network - will be part of delivering a message of hope – that there are better surgical options - to patients and families across the age spectrum.

We have a unique opportunity to forever change the standard of surgical care options for sarcoma patients. Our support will enable surgeons to consider taking on more complex cases that they may have previously denied without TumorGlow technology. Surgeons will be able to manage complex surgical cases like Callan’s with increasing frequency. Ultimately, there is potential to change the management strategy for these tumors and for the reach and success to extend far beyond the walls of CHOP and HUP.