It is common knowledge that motor vehicle accidents and suicides combined are the number one cause of death in children ages 1-16 in the United States. However, few people are aware that the next leading cause of death in children is brain cancer.

Dr. Jonathan Finlay is a professor of Pediatrics, Neurology and Neurosurgery at USC's Keck School of Medicine and the Clinical Director of the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles Neural Tumors Program. "We have managed to overcome so many of the childhood scourges such as polio and diabetes that resulted in early mortality. Even leukemia, which had a zero survival rate in 1950, is now at almost eighty five percent cure rate," says Dr. Finlay. "But there are so many different kinds of brain cancer in children. With some, we've had significant success. While with others, we have not made progress at all."

One extraordinary success credited to Dr. Finlay was the creation nearly twenty years ago of the "Head Start" Program. This innovative program aggressively treats malignant brain tumors in children under six years of age with a combination of surgery and chemotherapy and avoids the use of radiation therapy that was shown to irreparably damage developing brains of young children. Since that time, he has established a multi-institutional, multi-national consortium of 41 hospitals in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina which have joined together to conduct three consecutive clinical "Head Start" trials. The last trial, in which 220 children participated, concluded in December 2009. The results are currently under analysis.

Coordinating and collating these data is extremely costly and Dr. Finlay's research has never been underwritten by the federal government. His research has been fully funded by private philanthropic organizations along with some support from Childrens Hospital Los Angeles and the University of Southern California. However, Dr. Finlay was recently informed that two of his prime benefactors responsible not only for funding clinical studies, but also the support of the young doctors who win a fellowship to come and train under him for a year, had run out of money. The funding for this tremendously important work is no longer available.

"Right now we are training the next generation of pediatric neuro-oncologists. These are the people who are going to make great leaps in the field in the coming decades," says Dr. Finlay, who can name a dozen former fellows who are now leaders in the field throughout the world. "It is acutely a problem for the future. We have the potential to make tremendous progress, but without continued funding, the clinical studies and education of the next generation of doctors will not continue."

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Kelley Coughlan Email Contact Ballantines PR Tel: +1.310.454.3080 Fax: +1.310.943.1978 www.ballantinespr.com