Auto dealers charity Hyundai Hope on Wheels drives funding for new pediatric cancer research

UNIVERSITY CITY (WPVI) -- Only 4% of the cancer research money from the National Institutes of Health goes to childhood cancer, so private funding is essential.

One auto dealers group is helping bridge that gap with its initiative, Hyundai Hope on Wheels.

Neuroblastoma is the most common solid cancer in children under the age of five, but Dr. Adam Wolpaw and Dr. Timothy Spear of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia say despite recent progress, it's also one of the hardest to treat.

"The initial treatment is long and complicated," said Dr. Wolpaw.

And if neuroblastoma returns, "that percentage of relapsed, we don't have any cures for those people, for those children," says Dr. Spear.

Both are trying to better understand and use a child's immune system to boost treatment success.

In neuroblastoma, cells not only vary from child to child, but they can even vary in the same child.

Dr. Wolpaw says a current antibody treatment is good at wiping out cells carrying a specific marker, but what about the ones that don't have that marker?

"We saw that they have some vulnerabilities that suggest they might be more easily killed with immune cells," Dr. Wolpaw says.

Dr. Spear is developing new tools for that.

"To either engineer children's immune cells to fight the cancer or develop vaccines to inform those immune cells how to fight cancer," he says.

One avenue is CAR-T cell therapy, which is a successful treatment for leukemia - a blood cancer - but is only starting to be tested in solid tumors like neuroblastoma.

Together, they're receiving $650,000 from Hyundai Hope on Wheels.

The program began in 1998 with one Boston-area dealer.

"And every Hyundai dealer in the room said the same thing - how to I get involved in my part of the country?" said Peter Lanzavecchia, president of Burns Hyundai in Marlton, New Jersey.

Now, 26 years later, Hope on Wheels is national, with $26 million going out this year to fund pediatric cancer research.

"Bringing our total since 1998 to a quarter of a billion dollars," Lanzavecchia says.

Dr. Spear and Dr. Wolpaw are grateful to Hyundai for it's commitment to beating kids' cancer.

"We want to work toward a world where no family goes through that," notes Lanzavecchia.

For more information, visit: Hyundaihopeonwheels.org