The ACCELERATE platform was re-organised in June 2018 to strengthen international cooperation in order to improve global development of new paediatric oncology drugs.
Why?
Cancer is rare in children and adolescents: each year, 15,000 new cases from birth to age 15 and 20,000 from age 15 to 25. Despite major progress over the last 50 years (80% of young people with cancer are disease free at 5 years of age), cancer remains the first cause of death by disease beyond the age of one. At the same time, there are major breakthroughs in understanding cancer and developing innovative therapies for adults. The European Paediatric Medicine Regulation has significantly changed the landscape of new drug development for children and adolescents with cancer. However, needs are far from being addressed and there is a need to learn from the past in order to facilitate and speed up new drug development.
Therefore, there is a need to accelerate the process of evaluating innovative therapies and introducing them in standard cancer care in children and adolescents.
How?
The ACCELERATE international platform provides a transparent forum to discuss and address, in a timely fashion, overarching issues in the development of innovative anticancer medicines for children and adolescents with cancer. The ultimate goal is improvement in outcomes for children and adolescents with cancer.
Through Working Groups composed of representatives of the four stakeholders (representatives from parents organisations, academia, pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies), the ACCELERATE platform explores the current situation, identifies bottlenecks and hurdles and makes proposals to improve the development of anticancer drugs in the paediatric and adolescents population.
The work performed and the results achieved by the ACCELERATE platform working groups are published in peer reviewed journals.
Conference
The ACCELERATE Annual Conference serves as a forum for discussion, sharing and networking to facilitate the buy-in by the stakeholders as well the implementation of the proposals, to monitor progresses and to further identify areas of improvement.
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