Research Advancing Precision Medicine for Neuroblastoma

Her funded project, “Telomere Maintenance Mechanisms as Prognostic and Predictive Markers in Neuroblastoma: Establishing Molecular Risk Stratification,” aims to improve individualized risk assessment and treatment planning for children with neuroblastoma.

The Experimental Pediatric Oncology team investigates telomere maintenance mechanisms, molecular processes that enable tumor cells to divide indefinitely and thereby sustain tumor growth. Previous work by the group has shown that these mechanisms can provide a particularly precise assessment of an individual patient’s disease course and are highly suitable for risk stratification in children with neuroblastoma.

With support from the foundation, the researchers will now validate these findings in a large patient cohort. They will also investigate whether tumors with different telomere maintenance mechanisms respond differently to currently available therapies.

The ultimate goal is to establish prognostic and predictive biomarkers for clinical use, enabling treatment strategies to be tailored more precisely to each patient’s individual risk profile and the biological characteristics of their tumor. In the long term, this approach could help improve outcomes for children with neuroblastoma while reducing unnecessary side effects and the potential long-term consequences of overtreatment.

Carolina Rosswog is CAP Awardee 2026 at the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne: https://www.cmmc-uni-koeln.de/research/research-areas-projects/research-area-a/rosswog-carolina-cap-46  

This message has been translated and modified by the CMMC (K. Heber & D. Grosskopf-Kroiher) and is based on the text by the press and communications teams of the University Hospital Cologne (original German version here).