Comment on Akron Children’s joins with Cincinnati hospital to offer access to new cancer treatments

For most of Trevor Weigand’s young life, Akron Children’s Hospital has been his second home.Since developing health problems at age 4 that were diagnosed as brain cancer a year later, Trevor, now 11, has been in and out of Akron Children’s for surgeries, chemotherapy treatments and hospitalizations.When his doctors determined his tumors were growing despite standard therapies, the fifth-grader from Alliance recently became the first Akron Children’s patient to get experimental treatments through a new program with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.The partnership between Akron Children’s and Cincinnati Children’s is giving local cancer patients whose disease has relapsed or progressed access to new treatments while allowing them to stay closer to home for most of their care.Akron Children’s has joined with the Cincinnati Children’s Advanced Cancer Therapies Network to offer cancer patients access to Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials.Phase 1 trials are the first test in human patients of new drugs to evaluate safety, appropriate doses and side effects on a small scale.