The Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET) Initiative seeks to help bring the new era of targeted cancer therapy to bear on the cancers that afflict children. By characterizing genomic changes associated with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and neuroblastoma, TARGET will pinpoint those genes that are consistently altered, as these genes represent strong candidates for therapeutic targeting.

The National Cancer Institute is collaborating with several institutions that have made available clinically annotated, high-quality human tissue collections meeting TARGET's strict scientific, technical, and ethical requirements for data analysis.

Data analysis will assist in identifying therapeutic targets in these two childhood cancers, to catalyze the development of more effective treatments.

These data will be annotated, archived, and processed through the Data section of this site, which will include a Biomedical Informatics Grid™ (caBIG™) -compatible, Web-based data portal. The data will be periodically evaluated to prioritize selections of candidate gene regions for targeted sequencing. Interpreted characterization data produced by TARGET will be made publicly available, adhering to the Initiative's comprehensive patient privacy and confidentiality policies.

Data generated from the TARGET analyses will be deposited into databases on an ongoing basis. TARGET data will be accessible from this page in the near future.