Maintenance Therapy for Ewing Sarcoma

Already funded by Golf Fights Cancer

Ewing sarcoma can be a very treatable and curable condition of children, teenagers and adults except in instances that metastases are present.  Metastases or primary site recurrence can sometimes occur as late as 3 decades after therapy in both sexes, and interestingly sometimes after pregnancy in women.  Compared to other childhood cancers, late relapses are not uncommon: in one study observing 1,351 patients who survived to year 5 after diagnosis, 209 patients died — and for 144 (69%) the cause of death was Ewing sarcoma; cumulative incidence of death of Ewing’s sarcoma was 10% at 10 years, 14% at 20 years and 16% at 30 years. Furthermore, frontline therapy can also leave patients with physical side effects of surgery and chemotherapy for many years, such as a 15% incidence of secondary cancers including treatment-related myelodysplastic syndrome/acute myelogenous leukemia (excluding skin cancers, which also occur). The primary goal of this project is to create non-chemotherapy fluoroquinolone derivatives that make chemotherapy work better and prevent early and late relapse in Ewing sarcoma.