Jul 1, 2026 · 26 min · 12 segments
Dr. Charles Roberts, director of the St. Jude Comprehensive Cancer Center, joins Timothy Chou to discuss how pediatric cancer research is moving beyond nonspecific toxic therapies toward targeted…
Charles RobertsGuest
Timothy ChouHost
So could you, I don't know that everybody, maybe everybody's familiar with St. Jude's, but I think it occupies a rather unique position in children's hospitals in the world.
I think lots of people know about St. Jude, but they don't necessarily really understand the St. Jude mission of the full breadth of what goes on.
And so St. Jude's mission is to advance cures and means of prevention for pediatric catastrophic disease through research and treatment.
We're motivated by our founder, Danny Thomas's vision that no child should die in the dawn of life.
And so ultimately, the goal of St. Jude is really to treat the untreatable and cure the uncurable.
And as soon as we make advances to share that information out there so that others can adopt it and move on to the next problem that is preventing success or harming people.
And right from its founding, it was an institution that is open to all and no family ever pays for treatment, travel, housing, or food.
And so it is designed to make the exceptional care at St. Jude available to all.
And almost all of our patients are on research protocols of one type or another that take the best care best current therapy that we have and are trying to look for what can do even better.
We've been heavily focused on childhood cancer but are increasingly as technologies coming along moving into other diseases and so we span the spectrum of fundamental discovery science from structural biology, chemical biology, computational biology, imaging sciences all the way through translation into a large cadre of clinical trials, most of which are investigator-initiated here.
So it really is a unique engine that is trying to constantly focus on pushing the envelope to do better, including into survivorship and increasingly major efforts around the world improve the outcome for kids in in low and middle income countries as well
So could you, I don't know that everybody, maybe everybody's familiar with St. Jude's, but I think it occupies a rather unique position in children's hospitals in the world.
I think lots of people know about St. Jude, but they don't necessarily really understand the St. Jude mission of the full breadth of what goes on.
And so St. Jude's mission is to advance cures and means of prevention for pediatric catastrophic disease through research and treatment.
We're motivated by our founder, Danny Thomas's vision that no child should die in the dawn of life.
And so ultimately, the goal of St. Jude is really to treat the untreatable and cure the uncurable.
And as soon as we make advances to share that information out there so that others can adopt it and move on to the next problem that is preventing success or harming people.
And right from its founding, it was an institution that is open to all and no family ever pays for treatment, travel, housing, or food.
And so it is designed to make the exceptional care at St. Jude available to all.
And almost all of our patients are on research protocols of one type or another that take the best care best current therapy that we have and are trying to look for what can do even better.
We've been heavily focused on childhood cancer but are increasingly as technologies coming along moving into other diseases and so we span the spectrum of fundamental discovery science from structural biology, chemical biology, computational biology, imaging sciences all the way through translation into a large cadre of clinical trials, most of which are investigator-initiated here.
So it really is a unique engine that is trying to constantly focus on pushing the envelope to do better, including into survivorship and increasingly major efforts around the world improve the outcome for kids in in low and middle income countries as well
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