Corinn Cross, MD (Host): Welcome to PedsCast, a podcast brought to you by Children's of Alabama in Birmingham. I'm your host, Dr. Cori Cross. Thank you for joining us. Today we'll be speaking with Dr. Jamie Aye, who was recently appointed Director of Developmental Therapeutics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. As Director of Developmental Therapeutics, Dr. Aye works to develop novel treatments for children with cancer and blood disorders.

Dr. Aye thank you for joining us.

Jamie Aye, MD: Thank you for having me.

Host: So broad picture, for those of us who might not know, what is developmental therapeutics?

Jamie Aye, MD: Yeah, that's a great question. So developmental therapeutics is kinda like it sounds, so it's to develop more effective, less toxic therapies for children, particularly those with cancer. And we do that by trying to bring things from the bench to the bedside.

Host: So it's medications.

Jamie Aye, MD: Yes.

Host: Got it. And so can you tell us the type of patients who are referred to this program, and the challenges they face? Are they all children who are having cancer or are there specific types of cancers that this is more suited towards?

Jamie Aye, MD: This program is really meant for patients who have difficult to treat, recurrent, relapsed cancers who have already seen standard therapies and have unfortunately failed those therapies and need something new and novel to try and get rid of their cancer.

Host: So when you're working in this type of environment, are you working alongside other researchers and other hospitals? Because I'm assuming that the patient load with these different types of cancers, it's very rare. So how do you get the numbers to make the decisions?

Jamie Aye, MD: Yeah, great question. So yes, we, have various consortia that are either disease specific or perhaps they're specific with regards to particular genetic abnormality that's shared amongst a group of cancers. And, we work in these consortium with other institutions throughout the United States and elsewhere to come up with those patient numbers to be able to see if something will make a difference.

Host: So as Director of Developmental Therapeutics, tell us a little bit about how this program makes a difference in children's lives. And sort of what they experience when they come to this clinic. How is it different than when they're sort of getting treated the first-time?

Jamie Aye, MD: Yeah. So I think, it provides the family with hope that we will find something that will provide them with some newer options that their cancer hasn't seen. They still come to our regular clinic, so that doesn't change. They are able to keep their same primary oncologist if they've been treated here.

We do have referrals from outside facilities for trials here that may not be available at their home institution. But I think, just providing families with that hope and hopefully overall, research over time is able to provide therapies for children with various cancers, in these difficult to treat scenarios.

Host: Now you've been at this program for a while now. You are now director, but previously you were associate director. Can you tell me a little bit about the progress you've seen and, how you and your team have made changes over, over that time period?

Jamie Aye, MD: Yeah, so, you know, research certainly takes time and takes a team, and we are very blessed here at Children's of Alabama to be surrounded by the University of Alabama, at Birmingham and all the researchers here, anywhere from researchers within pharmacology or radiology or immunology, genetics.

 So, in my time as associate director, we created our annual research pediatric retreat here, to bring those researchers together so that hopefully we can see commonalities between the different projects that we're working on so that people aren't siloed and hopefully can collaborate, with either new technologies, maybe a new biomarker to be able to measure how much disease, new immunotherapies, maybe new ways of detecting disease by imaging.

So I think we've helped to start build those collaborations here locally. And I think that will help us in moving forward.

Host: Do you have any success stories that you can share with us? 

Jamie Aye, MD: So while I don't have a success story yet, Dr. Gregory Friedman, who was the former director of the program, ran a successful early phase trial that used a new type of immunotherapy to treat patient's with recurrent or progressive brain tumors. And so we continue to work toward our overall goal of the program, which is to generate what Dr. Friedman did called an investigator initiated trial, where we take the work that our researchers are doing and turn it into a trial here at Children's of Alabama and UAB so that it can actually affect a patient. And we're in the process of working on some projects, which hopefully in the coming years will turn into fruition.

Host: Is there anything else the future holds for the program?

Jamie Aye, MD: Having those investigator initiated trials and then also continuing to build with industry and different pharmaceutical companies to hopefully bring in new therapeutic options that way to try, and then again, to continue to build our collaborations with the various consortia and adding to our portfolio of trials that we're able to offer our patients.

Host: Well, that sounds really exciting, to really be on the forefront of this type of research and what you're able to provide to these kids because it really, it really is a last resort when you have either some sort of recurring cancer or you're not responding to treatment. So to know that they have people fighting for them, that's I'm sure very comforting to them and their families. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our listeners today?

Jamie Aye, MD: I think just to summarize, you know, developmental therapeutics, again, the goal is to develop new therapies that are less toxic, especially for these patients with relapsed recurrent disease that it's very difficult to treat. And we're hoping to do that again by building these research collaborations, both here locally and nationally, with a big overall goal of developing these investigator initiated trials here at UAB and Children's.

Corinn Cross, MD (Host): Well, this has been so interesting to learn about what you're doing. For more information, please visit children'sal.org and search developmental therapeutics program. That's children'sal.org and search developmental therapeutics program. That concludes this episode of Children's of Alabama PedsCast. If you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and be sure to check out the entire podcast library for other topics that might be of interest to you. Please remember to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Thank you for listening to this episode of PedsCast.