Before I led the Cure Coalition, I spent years working in medicine while I was — like so many of the families we advocate for — a parent navigating the healthcare world, hoping the science behind my kids’ care was as strong as it possibly could be. September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and it’s a moment I take personally, both as a mother and as someone trained to understand what it actually takes to turn a diagnosis into a cure.
Fifty years ago, a diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common childhood leukemia, was nearly always fatal. This was the case for my cousin who lost her battle several weeks into her short life. Today, survival rates exceed 90% for many children with ALL. That transformation didn’t happen because of one breakthrough or one lucky discovery. It happened because researchers spent decades building, testing, and refining treatment step by step, largely through the careful use of animal models that helped scientists understand how these cancers grow and how to fight them safely.
Combination chemotherapy, now a cornerstone of pediatric cancer treatment, exists because animal tumor models showed researchers that combining drugs could overcome resistance in ways single treatments couldn’t. For childhood brain tumors like medulloblastoma, animal models have allowed scientists to study how these cancers develop and test potential therapies before they ever reach a child. And when cancer relapses or stops responding to treatment, which remains one of the hardest realities for families, researchers rely on this same research foundation to understand why and to search for better answers.
As a clinician, I’ve seen firsthand how each of these advances traces back to research that was careful, incremental, and rigorously tested before it ever touched a patient. As a mother, I know why that rigor matters: because when it’s your child, “close enough” isn’t good enough.
That’s why the Cure Coalition is clear-eyed about the path forward. New research tools and technologies hold real promise, and we should keep investing in them. But we cannot afford to discard proven research methods before reliable alternatives have been fully validated. As Stanford Medicine has noted, animal research “remains essential to the discovery of the causes, diagnoses, and treatment of disease and suffering in humans and in animals.” Congress doesn’t have to choose between innovation and safety; our children need both.
This month, we released a one-pager detailing five specific advancements in childhood cancer made possible by proven research methods — from chemotherapy to the next generation of treatments still being developed today. You can find it in our resources.
Protecting the research foundation behind these breakthroughs isn’t abstract policy. It’s personal to American families fighting cancer, and they deserve every method available to win that fight.
Cara Kingan
Executive Director, The Cure Coalition