The Developmental Therapeutics team at Children’s of Alabama is working to develop new treatments for children with cancer.
Having cancer is challenging enough for a child and their family, but when the standard treatments aren’t working, they find themselves searching for answers. As Director of Developmental Therapeutics at Children’s of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Jamie Aye, M.D., is responsible for finding those answers.
Aye was appointed to the position in August 2025 after serving as associate director since 2023. In her current role, she leads a team dedicated to developing more effective, less toxic therapies for children with cancer. In some cases, the cancers are rare; in other cases, the cancers are recurrent with no available curative treatment. Either way, developmental therapeutics provides hope for solutions.
“It provides the family with hope that we will discover newer options that their cancer hasn’t seen,” said Aye, who’s also an associate professor of Pediatrics at UAB.
The team achieves this through a two-pronged strategy. One prong involves working to develop new therapies for cases that are recurrent or difficult to treat. “It’s really hard to see a patient go through that,” Aye said. The other prong is developing less-toxic therapies that reduce immediate and long-term side effects—for example, “If we’re able to use a new immunotherapy in conjunction with radiation that allows us to give the radiation at a lower dose,” Aye said, “now that patient has a lower risk for a secondary cancer from radiation.”
The program has a history of success. A few years ago, Gregory Friedman, M.D., one of Aye’s predecessors, led a successful early phase trial that used a new type of immunotherapy to treat patients with recurrent or progressive brain tumors. Friedman’s novel treatment was the result of an investigator-initiated trial, where the team takes the work its researchers are doing and turns it into a clinical trial. Developing these types of trials is the overarching goal of the program. And the research avenues are broad, Aye says, “from researchers within pharmacology, radiology, immunology or genetics,” to name a few. Aye works to bring these researchers together “so that hopefully we can see commonalities between the different projects that we’re working on, so that people aren’t siloed and can collaborate through either new technologies, new biomarkers to measure how much disease, new immunotherapies, or new ways of detecting disease by imaging,” she said.
Any type of research the team is doing has the potential to turn into an effective treatment. “It could even just be a pathway a researcher is investigating,” Aye said. “Hopefully through collaborations that we’re establishing, we can see how that pathway may relate to a particular cancer that we’re hoping to find a treatment for—and then from that, test a new therapy, and then if it works in the lab, seeing how we can get it to a patient.”
Collaborations are one of the keys to making these trials happen. As director of the program, Aye works to build relationships both near and far. Locally, she leads an annual research retreat to bring together researchers—both basic science and clinical researchers—to work on developing investigator-initiated trials using novel therapies. She developed this retreat during her time as associate director of the program. Nationally, she works with industry and pharmaceutical companies—to investigate new therapeutic options—and with consortia to add to the program’s portfolio of trials available to patients at Children’s and UAB.
Aye is already working toward more investigator initiated trials, “which, hopefully in the coming years, will come to fruition,” she said, to provide more options and more hope for children with cancer. “It’s why we do what we do,” she added. “Because we want to improve their outcomes and also find treatments that don’t leave them with lifelong side effects.”
