Artisan Biopharma

05/10/2026

Economist and parent Sam Daems with colleagues published, “A novel approach to boost drug development in pediatric oncology” in Nature Reviews. Lucy and Team’s summary and perspective, excerpted below.:

This article proposes a new business model to incentivize investors, private companies and public organizations to invest in drug development for pediatric cancers ... The proposed model would be developed on the basis of three concepts:

(A) pooled funding in a structured capital model,
(B) target-specific special-purpose vehicles (SPVs), and
(C) advanced drug reimbursement agreements

For a full summary, link to the article and our perspective, please visit https://artisanbio.com/2026-0504-daems-paper/

04/30/2026

Across the Pond: the Sarcoma UK 5-year vision

Sarcoma UK is a nonprofit organization who published this concise seven page 5 year strategy. An excerpt of the summary & perspectives by Lucy and team is below.

Summary: Sarcoma cases in the UK are increasing, with thousands diagnosed each year and many more expected in oncoming years ... The approval of sarcoma drugs is infrequent, with some sarcoma patients still being treated with drugs from the 1970s. To address these issues, Sarcoma UK’s new 2026–2031 strategy aims to expand support, improve diagnosis and treatment, increase research funding, and strengthen collaboration across the healthcare system. The goal is to ensure faster diagnoses, better care, and equal access to support so that patients can live longer, healthier lives.

Recommendation 1: Healthcare providers should be trained to recognize sarcoma symptoms sooner ...

Recommendation 2: Patients should be referred more quickly ...

Recommendation 3: More government and private funding should be allocated ... and international collaboration is cited as a key new effort.

Our Perspective:
We are especially heartened by the “international” scope of collaborations suggested by Sarcoma UK, and hope that these collaborations go across both academic and biopharma efforts.

For a link to the strategy, a full summary, and our perspective, please see https://artisanbio.com/across-the-pond-the-sarcoma-uk-5-year-vision/

04/21/2026

The whitepaper on Redefining a Pediatric Cancer Drug Development (here) is not peer-reviewed, and is greatly reminiscent of the iconic 11-year old video by Noah’s Light Foundation, but given the group is in the ecosystem, we summarize and give a perspective on the whitepaper here:
Summary:
The authors cite the failure to develop childhood cancer treatments due to lack of support. An assertion is that main issue isn’t a lack of scientific discoveries, but the failure to turn those discoveries into actual treatments. While early research is funded by public and philanthropic sources, the later stage, clinical drug development, depends on industry support, which is often lacking. As a result, many promising treatments stall in the “valley of death” due to a disparity in industry focus, incentives, and ownership. The approach suggested is strong partnerships with academic hospitals and funding from mission-driven sources such as foundations, family offices, impact investors, and venture philanthropy groups.

For the review's recommendations and our important Perspective, see Lucy’s News & Perspectives Series at the artisanbio.com website.

04/21/2026

For the paper, The impact of focused federal initiatives on pediatric cancer research by Subhashini Jagu (first author), Gregory Reaman (senior author) et al in the journal Cancer, a summary is:

This report cites two new programs which will hopefully contribute major advances to childhood cancer research. Recent research has yielded improved outcomes for children and young people with cancer, but pediatric malignancies still remains the leading cause of disease-related death in U.S. children, and over 30% of survivors face serious long-term side effects. Progress has been slowed by challenges like limited funding incentives, and limited data sharing. To address this, the U.S. government passed the STAR Act, first passed in 2018, reauthorized in 2023, with $30 million allocated to them annually to enhance research in three key areas: pediatric cancer bio-specimen collection and biobanking, childhood and AYA survivorship research, and pediatric cancer registry efforts. Shortly after, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) launched the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI), a 10 year, $50-million-per-year federal investment. These programs fund research, improve data collection, expand biobanking (especially for rare cancers), expand genetic research, identify new treatment targets, and strengthen cancer registries. Together, they aim to enhance understanding of pediatric cancers, support better treatments, enhance survival rates, and improve survivors’ quality of life through more coordinated and data-driven research efforts. Overall, continued funding and support for these programs are essential to speed up progress in treating pediatric cancer.

For the review's recommendations and our Perspective, see Lucy’s News & Perspectives Series at the artisanbio.com website.

04/21/2026

Here is Lucy's perspective on a landmark paper:

Drs. Gore and O’Brien published this review for Cell in 2024, recapped below.

Over the past 50 years, childhood cancer has shifted from being largely fatal to highly survivable, with survival rates now exceeding 85% due to advances in treatment, research, and collaboration. We can attribute a lot of this progress to improved chemotherapy, targeted therapies, immunotherapy, safer supportive care, and large multicenter clinical trials. Key progress includes better risk stratification (using clinical features, genetics, and treatment response), discoveries in genomics that led to targeted treatments, and more effective combinations of chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, and stem cell transplants. Immunotherapies like CAR T-cell therapy and monoclonal antibodies have also significantly improved outcomes. However, there are still some diagnoses (infant acute lymphoblastic leukemia, metastatic sarcoma, diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma) whose treatments have not made significant progress. For cancer subtypes with better survival, the treatment regimens still remain highly toxic with highly imposing long-term side effects. Overall, many major advancements have been made, and these advancements serve as a foundation for continued work to improve cure rates and reduce long-term impacts.

For the review's recommendations and our Perspective, see Lucy’s News & Perspectives Series at the artisanbio.com website.

04/21/2026

Here is Lucy's summary of a poignant paper ...

Publication: Institute of Medicine (2005), Making Better Drugs for Children with Cancer. Peter Adamson, Susan Wein, Joseph Simone and Hellen Gellband. 57 pages. peer reviewed.

Summary: This report cites a then near-absence of research in pediatric cancer drug discovery. Over the preceding 40 years before the report, childhood cancer in countries like the United States had shifted from being largely fatal to having high long-term survival rates, thanks to intensive use of drugs originally developed for adults. However, further progress now requires new, targeted treatments because simply intensifying existing therapies yields only modest gains and significant side effects. Despite promising molecular discoveries that could lead to more precise drugs, pharmaceutical companies had had little financial incentive to invest in pediatric cancer research due to the small market size. Organizations such as the National Cancer Institute (where technical capacity for drug discovery and development for pediatric cancers already exists), and the Food and Drug Administration were thought to be need to reduce delays in starting pediatric clinical trials if one wants to see better outcomes in terms of curing cancer in children. The takehome was that “public-private partnership” could knit together the pieces in a virtual research and development (R&D) network.

For our the paper's recommendations and our Perspective on this paper, see Lucy’s News & Perspectives Series at the artisanbio.com website

04/21/2026

Meet our Volunteer Lucy

Hi, I’m Lucy – a member of the cc-TDI Junior Board of Directors. For this new social media series, we are going to explore the historical and contemporary approaches to developing new treatments for childhood cancer. We will present publications and white papers, summarized, with a perspective of how well each approach has or would work. We will use AI tools for summarization, but also add human supervision to those summaries (mine, and cc-TDI staff) as well as a broader perspective. There are no right answers to developing new medicines for children’s cancer, only an unmet clinical need. The diversity of idea may in fact be the essence of the solution!

See Lucy’s News & Perspectives Series at the artisanbio.com website

04/21/2026

Artisan is thrilled to announce our first full-time staff!

Tony Haight is a seasoned veteran of the biopharma industry. As a chemist and thought leader, Tony will serve as Chief Science Officer--with his vast experience and passion for helping kids with rare cancer diagnoses he brings a great deal of hope for the future.

Cody Stiverson is an Air Force veteran who knows first-hand what it is to be a parent of a child with a rare cancer. After years of volunteer involvement, Cody is expanding his research interests into finding cures as the Chief Operations Officer for Artisan BioPharma.

We are moving quickly towards our first goal of fundraising, but we need your help! If you have a passion for this critical cause, please reach out to see how you can help make this endeavor successful.
Cody Stiverson

07/20/2025