Managing Pandora's Box: Familial Expectations around the Return of (Future) Germline Results.

Background: Pediatric oncology patients are increasingly being offered germline testing to diagnose underlying cancer predispositions. Meanwhile, as understanding of variant pathogenicity evolves, planned reanalysis of genomic results has been suggested. Little is known regarding the types of genomic information that parents and their adolescent children with cancer prefer to receive at the time of testing or their expectations around the future return of genomic results.

Knowledge Is Power: Benefits, Risks, Hopes, and Decision-Making Reported by Parents Consenting to Next-Generation Sequencing for Children and Adolescents with Cancer.

Objectives: To qualitatively describe parent perspectives of next-generation genomic sequencing (NGS) for their children with cancer, including perceived benefits, risks, hopes/expectations, and decision-making process when consenting or not consenting to NGS and prior to result disclosure.

Data Sources: Qualitative interviews were used.

Conclusion: Altruism is an important factor in parents consenting to NGS testing, as well as making sense of their child's cancer and legacy building.

Speaking genomics to parents offered germline testing for cancer predisposition: Use of a 2-visit consent model.

Background: Patients with cancer are increasingly offered genomic sequencing, including germline testing for cancer predisposition or other disorders. Such testing is unfamiliar to patients and families, and clear communication is needed to introduce genomic concepts and convey risk and benefit information.

Methods: Parents of children with cancer were offered the opportunity to have their children's tumor and germline examined with clinical genomic sequencing.

Efficient construction of producer cell lines for a SIN lentiviral vector for SCID-X1 gene therapy by concatemeric array transfection.

Retroviral vectors containing internal promoters, chromatin insulators, and self-inactivating (SIN) long terminal repeats (LTRs) may have significantly reduced genotoxicity relative to the conventional retroviral vectors used in recent, otherwise successful clinical trials. Large-scale production of such vectors is problematic, however, as the introduction of SIN vectors into packaging cells cannot be accomplished with the traditional method of viral transduction. We have derived a set of packaging cell lines for HIV-based lentiviral vectors and developed a novel concatemeric array transfection technique for the introduction of SIN vector genomes devoid of enhancer and promoter sequences in the LTR.

Intravascular administration of tumor tropic neural progenitor cells permits targeted delivery of interferon-beta and restricts tumor growth in a murine model of disseminated neuroblastoma.

Background: Interferon-beta (IFN-beta) has potent antitumor activity; however, systemic toxicity has limited its clinical use. We investigated the potential of targeted delivery using tumor-tropic neural progenitor cells (NPCs) transduced to express human IFN-beta (hIFN-beta).

Methods: Disseminated neuroblastoma was established in SCID mice by tail vein injection of tumor cells.