Dell will lend its computing muscle to TGen for a clinical trial that seeks to deliver treatments to children with a rare form of cancer.

Phoenix-based Translational Genomics Research Institute will evaluate the DNA of children with neuroblastoma, an often-fatal cancer that afflicts one in 100,000 children.

TGen will work with doctors treating children afflicted with the disease with the goal of developing tailored medical treatments.

The study will initially include about 20 children and 10 hospitals located across the United States. No local hospitals will be involved during the trial's first year, but TGen officials said that Phoenix Children's Hospital plans to participate during the second year of the study.

Dell will donate about $4 million in cash and "cloud computing" power that will allow TGen and other researchers to accelerate DNA analysis and potential treatments for patients.

Jeffrey Trent,TGen's president and research director, said that Dell's computing assist is significant because it allows his researchers to do their work in a more rapid fashion.

Neuroblastoma originates in a child's nerve tissues in the abdomen, pelvis, spinal cord or other parts of the body. Sometimes the cancer can go away on its own, but other times the cancer proves challenging, according to Mayo Clinic.

TGen, doctors and hospitals participating through a group called the Neuroblastoma and Medulloblastoma Translational Research Consortium will gather tumor samples from patients enrolled in the study. TGen will sequence and analyze the unique genetic characteristics of the tumors with the goal of evaluating whether existing cancer drugs would prove effective at attacking the child's tumor.

"You try to come up with a targeted therapy," Trent said. "The idea is to capture all of their genomic information, profile them, then match that to (existing) drugs."

For Dell, the clinical trial is a chance to expand the computer maker's philanthropic efforts while helping advance personalized medical treatments for children battling this type of cancer. The hope is the clinical trial will help shed slight on new treatments that work for the children based on their DNA.

James Coffin, vice president and general manager of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences, said the study is an example of the type of personalized medical treatment that will become more common with the marriage of computing power and biology.

"We'll start to see a lot more innovation coming out a lot faster," Coffin said.

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