The Alberta Children’s Hospital and University of Calgary are working to find new cures and provide better care for children and families fighting cancer. Their goal is to create new hope for those children whose cancers evade treatment and those who suffer the significant side effects of current treatments. This unprecedented collaboration between child health specialists will turn research into action and undoubtedly propel forward pediatric cancer expertise in Calgary. Standards of care across all areas of the hospital will be elevated and innovations in clinical care will be provided for thousands of children with many other chronic and life-threatening diseases.

Each year, about 1,500 children and teens in Canada are diagnosed with cancer – cancer is the leading cause of death due to disease in kids. In our community, that translates to more than 925 kids in active or long-term follow up cancer care at the Alberta Children’s Hospital. Over the past several decades, research and new treatments have made it possible for 80% of children diagnosed with cancer to survive. Despite these advances in cure rate, more than half of survivors will suffer severe or even life-threatening side effects later in life, including problems with the heart, lungs, senses, intellect and secondary cancers. There is still much more work to be done for these children suffering late effects and for the one in five who will not survive.

For every 100 children diagnosed with cancer:

  20 will not survive

  64 will have lasting side effects

  All of them will suffer to some degree

Community support is helping childhood cancer specialists at our hospital provide the best care possible for young people and their families.  At the same time, your donations are enabling a team of scientists to search for new cures and new ways to reduce the harmful side effects of current treatments.

Thanks to you, cancer specialists at the hospital are:

Enhancing Care: Blood and Marrow Transplantation (BMT) - The Alberta Children’s Hospital  is nationally recognized for expertise in BMT, a complex medical procedure that’s helping kids with cancer as well as  other chronic, life-threatening conditions including anemia, autoimmune diseases and metabolic diseases.  BMT involves destroying a child’s defective bone marrow and replacing it with healthy cells to reboot the child’s immune system. Thanks to community support, the hospital is able to provide some patients with reduced-intensity transplants using lower doses of chemotherapy. This minimizes damage to a child’s organs and decreases the risk of life-threatening infections.

Conducting Crucial Research: Experimental and Applied Therapeutics - Recognizing the crucial need for new, less toxic therapies,  childhood cancer scientists at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute and the Southern Alberta Cancer Research Institute are working together to identify, test and bring to the clinical trial phase new drugs that offer new hope for families. Community support has recently funded new state-of-the-art high-throughput imaging technology that greatly increases the speed and efficiency with which researchers can analyze a potential new drug’s ability to destroy cancer cells. In addition to their work with drug-based cancer medicines, ACHRI researchers are also working to develop biological agents like oncolytic virus therapy, which involves a bio-engineered virus designed to target and kill cancer cells without impacting the healthy cells in the body.

Hospital at Home – To help reduce the toll that cancer treatment takes on families, the Alberta Children’s Hospital is the first in Canada to offer a pilot project for children called Hospital at Home. This unique community-funded program enables children to receive some chemotherapies and medications through “house calls” in the comfort of their own homes, rather than at the hospital. In addition to being less time-consuming and more convenient for parents, Hospital at Home is proving to be much less stressful for the kids undergoing treatment.  Learn more

Looking Ahead

The need for leading-edge research, world-class experts and new technology remains critical. Community support is crucial to allowing this important work to continue and helping our team find new, gentler and even more effective treatments for kids battling cancer.