Our Vision: To eradicate inequities for children, adolescents and young adults with cancer and blood disorders by ensuring equitable access to the best possible care and outcomes.
Our Mission: We will accomplish our vision via the rapid development and evaluation of collaborative, policy-relevant, evidence-based and community-informed health equity interventions.
Our research consortium relies on collaborative science to identify modifiable risk factors for and mechanisms underlying outcome disparities, and to develop novel interventions to reduce those disparities.
Why IGNITE?
Children living in poverty are more likely to relapse and die than their more-privileged counterparts, despite treatment on clinical trials at major academic centers . Despite these identified inequities, no evidence-based health equity interventions exist in pediatric oncology.
Rapid innovation in health equity research is necessary to address identified disparities and improve outcomes.
The rarity of childhood cancer means that the field of pediatric oncology relies on large, multicenter cooperative group trials to improve survival outcomes. As a result, addressing identified disparities in this context requires health equity interventions that are scalable across cooperative clinical trial groups (e.g., the Children’s Oncology Group) to allow for the evaluation of efficacy in reducing disparities.
From a logistical standpoint, this requires establishing a pipeline and feasibility testing framework within which to develop and evaluate health equity interventions. This is analogous to the familiar early-phase drug pipeline and consortia, which evaluate drugs for safety and initial signals of effect before running large, randomized controlled trials of efficacy. Currently, there is no existing research infrastructure in which to similarly develop, refine, and evaluate the feasibility of health equity interventions.
We are the first pediatric oncology health equity research consortium—a research infrastructure that will catalyze bold, innovative approaches to research that challenge the status quo and establish health equity science as an integrated priority across pediatric oncology nationally.
Collaborate with us
We are, by definition, collaborative. If you are an investigator, parent/patient advocate, or policy expert interested in collaborating to advance this research, please reach out to us.
Consortium funding
Our innovative research is possible through the support of donors and foundations. Any gift, no matter the size, advances our research mission to improve outcomes for every child with cancer. All donations are tax deductible and will directly support IGNITE research efforts.
