Bipartisan House Bill Pushes AI for Pediatric Cancer Care

A bipartisan House bill introduced last week would create a federal coordinator to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence and standardized health data and interoperable research platforms. The measure aims to speed up pediatric cancer research, improve clinical trial design and expand treatment options for patients.

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Introduced on July 9, the Accelerating Innovation for Kids Act – or AI for Kids Act – is co-sponsored by Michael McCaul, R-Texas, who is founder and co-chair of the Congressional Childhood Cancer Caucus, along with caucus co-chairs Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif. – who is a physician – and Rep Mike Kelly, R-Penn.

The proposed legislation, which was has been referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, builds on existing federal efforts, particularly at the National Institutes of Health’s Cancer Institute’s Childhood Cancer Data Initiative. It seeks to coordinate other U.S. Department of Health and Human Services agencies to support and strengthen AI-enabled pediatric cancer research and related work.

“We owe it to our nation’s children to leverage cutting-edge AI to improve their care and treatment options,” said McCaul in a statement. “By empowering AI to continuously drive research forward, we move one step closer to beating this heartbreaking disease once and for all,” he said.

Specifically, the bill – among other proposals – calls upon the President, in consultation with the HHS secretary, to appoint an individual or organization as the “coordinator of AI innovation.” The new AI innovation coordinator, which would serve as a member of the Domestic Policy Council, would be tasked with identifying opportunities to accelerate the advancement of “AI-driven” solutions at the CCDI.

That includes the potential to improve clinical trial design and access through incorporating AI approaches, and making data platforms and tools, such as predictive modeling, available as part of the CCDI data ecosystem.

The bill also calls for the AI innovation coordinator to address ways of improving data infrastructure and data sharing. That includes finalizing interoperability standards for both structured and unstructured patient data to be used with AI to enable “safe and privacy-compliant” exchanges of data.

The legislation hopes to improve the exchange and use of multiple sources of data – such as imaging, genomics, electronic health records and claims data – for “AI-ready” analysis. Another related aim is also to use AI to improve the selection of participants for clinical trials.

The bill proposes $100 million in annual funding for CCDI-related work with these AI efforts in fiscal years 2027 through 2031.

Researchers increasingly rely on AI to analyze genomics, pathology images, electronic health records and other clinical data to identify treatment targets and better match patients with clinical trials. But fragmented datasets, inconsistent standards and related obstacles challenge the technology’s broader use in pediatric oncology.

The bill’s co-sponsors did not immediately respond to ISMG’s requests for additional comment.

Some experts said it’s critical to accelerate AI innovation in the battle of against cancer, particularly pediatric cancers.

“We now have the biological insight and technological capability to personalize treatment decisions for the individual patient, yet much of pediatric cancer care still relies on population-based protocols,” said Jim Foote, co-founder and CEO of First Ascent Biomedical, a company developing AI-driven functional precision medicine platforms for cancer care.

“Modernizing how data is collected, shared, analyzed and translated into clinical decisions can help move pediatric cancer care from treating the average patient to treating the individual child,” said Foote, whose own son Trey died at age 17 in 2006 from osteosarcoma, or bone cancer.

“I view the Accelerating Innovation for Kids with Cancer Act as more than an AI bill. It is a pediatric cancer modernization bill,” Foote told ISMG.

“Children are not supposed to get cancer,” he said. “Yet cancer remains the leading cause of death by disease after infancy among children in the U.S.” Although survival has improved for some pediatric cancers, approximately 1,600 children and adolescents still die from cancer each year, according to research by the NIH’s National Cancer Institute.

“The standard curative chemotherapy regimen for osteosarcoma – high-dose methotrexate, doxorubicin and cisplatin – has remained largely unchanged for more than 40 years,” Foote said. “Trey was treated with drugs developed before many of today’s physicians were born, even as technology in nearly every other part of society was advancing exponentially.”

AI will not replace pediatric oncologists, and it should not, Foote said. “Its power lies in helping physicians bring together genomics, transcriptomics, imaging, pathology, treatment history, clinical outcomes and functional drug-response data. AI can analyze those complex and often fragmented data points and turn them into information that helps a physician make a more informed decision for the child in front of them.”

The bill’s focus on modernizing pediatric cancer data infrastructure, incorporating multimodal data and AI into clinical trials, improving data sharing and developing tools to predict treatment response and toxicity is the kind of acceleration children with cancer need, Foote said.

“Technology should not advance in years while pediatric cancer treatment advances in generations. Children deserve the full benefit of the biology, data and technology available today.”

Ultimately, modernization of AI-enabled cancer research must be built on trust, said Foote, who applauded the bill’s emphasis on safe, privacy-compliant data exchange and continued patient control over health information.

“Pediatric cancer data is among the most sensitive information imaginable. Cybersecurity, privacy, informed consent, interoperability, auditability and patient control must be incorporated into the architecture from the beginning – not added after the fact,” he said.

Foote added that he thinks the bipartisan support from the Congressional Childhood Cancer Caucus leadership team is a positive sign for propelling the bill forward. “I believe it has meaningful potential because pediatric cancer has traditionally been an issue that brings Republicans and Democrats together,” he said. “Childhood cancer is not a partisan issue.”