St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is the nation’s first and only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center devoted solely to pediatric cancer, and it has ranked among the top 10 children’s cancer hospitals in every U.S. News & World Report survey since the ranking launched in 2008. More than 9,000 patients are treated at St. Jude annually, most on an outpatient basis, as part of more than 130 active childhood cancer clinical trials. The hospital’s comprehensive cancer center is organized into five cross-disciplinary research programs spanning developmental biology and solid tumors, neurobiology and brain tumors, hematological malignancies, cancer control and survivorship, and cancer biology. It maintains two of the field’s foundational survivorship studies, the “St. Jude Lifetime Cohort Study” and the National Cancer Institute-supported “Childhood Cancer Survivors Study.” St. Jude also operates St. Jude Cloud, a data-sharing platform that gives the global research community access to genomic data to accelerate precision treatments for pediatric cancer. In 2026, St. Jude investigators published high-impact research using AI, including a study identifying IRS4 as a promising drug target across multiple solid tumors, a genomic analysis with the National Cancer Institute mapping the structural variants that drive pediatric cancer, and the M-PACT tool for classifying pediatric brain tumors through AI-powered liquid biopsy. St. Jude researchers also studied how different AI prompting strategies affect the technology’s ability to analyze interviews and identify childhood cancer survivors who need additional support services.
