The Paediatric Oncology Group

The Montreal Children's Hospital and Hospital For Sick Children belong to a group of hospitals in the United States and Canada which work together to improve the treatment of paediatric patients with malignant neoplastic diseases. This group of hospitals is called the Paediatric Oncology Group. The group is dedicated to conducting research into the cause, development, mechanisms of disease, and most importantly, the treatment of children with cancer, including leukaemia and other related cancers. They pool all the data together for the purpose of finding the most effective treatment possible, with the fewest side effects for children and adolescents with cancer.

Your child will probably be on a protocol (i.e. set of specific treatment programs) designed by members of the Paediatric Oncology Group. Every child with the same type of cancer in all the member institutions will be receiving the same medications on the same schedule. Some treatment protocols have more than one possible treatment schedule (arm), in order to determine which is more effective, or has fewer side effects. In that case, every child on the same treatment arm receives identical therapy. The main purpose of this is to improve the treatment of children and adolescents with cancer.