The Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC) was formed in 2012 to improve the overall and quality outcomes for children and young adults with central nervous systems (CNS) tumors.  Operated out of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), since its founding PNOC has grown from 8 to more than 25 sites across the world, recently expanding to Switzerland, Australia, Israel, India, and The Netherlands.  Through their cooperative network, PNOC is fostering worldwide collaboration in the pursuit of enhanced clinical trial development and treatments for CNS cancer, the deadliest form of pediatric cancer.

Patients and families are at the core of everything that we do. To a large degree, the reason to begin this consortium was based upon the need for innovative clinical trial development that fully harnessed emerging molecular technologies on behalf of children with the highest unmet needs. Since its inception, PNOC has pushed beyond older paradigms and historic trial designs.  Our overarching goal is to conduct early-phase clinical trials, which emphasize novel, biology-driven, precision-based therapeutics.  To this end, PNOC pursues clinical strategies based on the molecular and genetic make-up of each patient’s individual tumor. We assess therapies aimed at interfering with specific cellular pathways and aspire to spare patients from therapy that is not optimized for their unique tumor type.  Collaboration with multiple scientists and clinicians across the globe, sharing information and results freely in easily accessible data networks in real time, allows us to fulfil our core mission: to improve the outcome of all of our patients.