what research is being currently conducted by the nih on plga? what treatments and therapeutic alternatives are on the horizon for plga patients? and are there any clinical trials currently being conducted by nih for plga? i would really like to respond back to this little boy. >> thank you for the question. the doctor head of that department is currently out of the country, but i'll see what i can do. i'll agree, plga is one of those pediatric cancers that we definitely need better answers for, that it is slow growing it doesn't respond particularly well to the kinds of approaches as cancers that are growing rapidly. clearly, there's a connection here between what we were discussing a little bit ago in terms of a cancer focus of the precision medicine initiative, and as part of that the cancer institute aims to enroll something like 1,000 pediatric patients in this earlier stage of trying to understand what drives malignancy. i would be very surprised if some of those are not in fact plga patients. to try to understand more about the disease. ob

i agree plga is a cancer we need desperate answers for. it does not respond it particularly well to the kinds of approaches of the cancers that are rapidly growing and have made advances possible. clearly there is a connection tween what we were discusses and why we go in terms of cancer focus in the prevention initiative, and the cancer institute aims to enroll almost 1000 pediatric patients in this release your stage. -- early year strage. they want to find what drives malignancy. they want to try and understand more about the disease. one of the difficult problems is access to tissue. it is not an easy thing to imagine doing a biopsy of a tumor growing in such a vulnerable place. there are potential ways that one can begin to look at that. by looking at dna that is loading around freely in the blood circulation. because cancers could do turnover release their dna. one can discover it by looking in the circulation for free dna not inside a cell that can tell you what is going on without having to do a needle biopsy. a so-called liquid bi