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Those with Arizona nursing jobs (http://azjobs.cancercenter.com) may one day benefit from a new medical study being supported by one of the nation's largest technology companies.

Dell recently announced plans to expand the companies Powering the Possible program to provide funding, employee engagement, and cloud computing technology to support a number of pediatric cancer research programs.

Part of the funding will allow the Translational Genomics Research Institute, the Neuroblastoma and Medulloblastoma Translational Research Consortium, and Van Andel Research Institute to conduct the world's first personalized medicine trial for pediatric cancer.

TGen will use its genomic technology within Dell's cloud to help NMTRC identify a greater depth of personalized treatment strategies for children with neuroblastoma who are already enrolled in an NMTRC clinical trial.

Here are some key facts about neuroblastoma and the funding:

• Neuroblastoma attacks the sympathetic nervous system - which controls heart rate, blood pressure, and digestion - with aggressive tumors unique to each child.
• Neuroblastoma affects one out of every 100,000 children every year and is responsible for one in seven pediatric cancer-related deaths.
• The Food and Drug Administration has only approved one new treatment for childhood cancer since 1980, compared with 50 treatments for adult cancers.
• The new personalized medical trial is mainly being funded by parents of children with neuroblastoma and their foundations.
• The trial hopes to develop "real time" processing of information on patient tumors and predict the best drugs for a specific patient.
• Dell's cloud solution will allow TGen to increase its gene sequencing and analysis capacity by 1,200 percent
• The cloud also will allow for better collaboration among physicians, genetic researchers, pharmacists, and computer scientists working on the trial.
• Finally, the cloud will expand the program's participation from a handful of children today to hundreds of children over the next three years.

"Even at this earliest moment in genomics-guided therapy, there is universal recognition that the amount and complexity of data is overwhelming," Jeffrey M. Trent, Ph.D., president and research director of TGen and VARI, said in a statement.

"Dell's commitment to helping children with cancer, coupled with its expertise in developing cloud-based solutions for health information, will provide great benefit in terms of helping us manage the massively complex data generated by this clinical trial," he continued. "This will help physicians and scientists share information rapidly, and is designed to help us arrive at the optimal treatment decision for each child battling cancer."

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