Advances & Updates
Leading Bay Area children’s hospitals link up on brain cancer, tumors
Stanford Medicine’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital entered the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium earlier this month - December 29, 2025,
One of the Bay Area’s leading children’s hospitals has joined another in a group dedicated to eradicating brain cancer and tumors in children.
Stanford Medicine’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital entered the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium earlier this month as one of more than 40 participating sites. UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco serves as the “mission control center” coordinating the research and clinical trials across all the involved institutions, according to a statement the nonprofit foundation supporting the consortium issued earlier this month.
UCSF Drs. Michael Prados and Sabine Mueller co-founded the consortium in 2012, convincing a handful of other West Coast hospitals to join together to advance research of childhood brain cancer and tumors.
UCSF Drs. Michael Prados, left, and Sabine Mueller created the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium in 2012 in an effort to advance research into childhood brain cancer and tumors. -UCSF
They did so amid frustration that “the outcomes for kids hadn’t changed in over 50 years, which is really unacceptable,” said Bruce Campbell, who founded the nonprofit Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium Foundation in 2013 to raise money to support the consortium’s work.
Together, Campbell said the initial PNOC members wanted to “try and move the needle forward.”
“Sounds like a crazy idea that nobody was collaborating,” Campbell said. “But unfortunately, you know, research doesn’t always reward collaboration academically or financially. So if anything, it’s disincentivized in some ways.”
Since its founding, the PNOC has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of two therapies for childhood brain cancer. Campbell said he hopes such successes will only continue with Stanford now joining the fold.
The two university hospitals have previously collaborated in an unofficial capacity, with patients being referred to each depending on the expertise and availability of staff. Stanford is a leader in immunotherapy treatment for children with brain cancer, Campbell said.
“It was only a matter of time before they officially came on board,” he said.
Not all brain tumors are cancerous, but brain tumors are the most common cancerous masses diagnosed in children under the age of 14, according to the Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation. About 4,000 cases are diagnosed in the U.S. each year.