St. Jude Children's Research Hospital has named Dr. Charles W. M. Roberts as its new president and chief executive officer, replacing Dr. James R. Downing, who led the nonprofit for 12 years. Roberts, currently director of St. Jude's Comprehensive Cancer Center and an executive vice president, will begin the new role on Jan. 1, while Downing moves into a faculty position in the hospital's Global Pediatric Medicine department.

The leadership transition arrives at a moment of historic progress against childhood cancer. When actor and philanthropist Danny Thomas founded St. Jude in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1962, the survival rate for childhood cancer patients was around 20%. Today it is more than 80%, and Roberts says the hope is that all childhood cancers will someday be easily treatable, with major strides toward that goal now within reach.

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

"I'm really excited because I think we are at the dawn of a new era," Roberts told The Associated Press in an interview. "In the next several years, I believe we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to achieve much more of Danny's dream than ever before. And I'm excited to take us there."

That opportunity, Roberts said, stems from a convergence of technological advances that are creating treatments which kill childhood cancers more effectively while reducing their impact on the patient. Technology is also helping create treatments for more catastrophic childhood diseases beyond cancer, he said.

Recent milestones illustrate what such tools can deliver: in 2017, the FDA approved the first CAR-T cell therapy — a treatment that reprograms a patient's own immune cells — for children and young adults with a hard-to-treat leukemia, and genome-sequencing efforts such as the St. Jude–Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project, launched in 2010, have mapped the mutations driving many childhood cancers, opening the way to more targeted treatments.

Judy Habib, chair of the St. Jude Board of Governors, said Roberts' emphasis on new treatment discoveries played a significant role in convincing the board to choose him as the hospital's next leader following a global search.

"He combines the rigor of a researcher, the care of a clinician, and passion for our mission, making him the perfect person to lead one of the most accomplished pediatric research institutions in the world," Habib said in a statement.

A researcher at the helm

Even as he takes on the CEO role, Roberts said he plans to continue his own research, which has included confirming that certain genes suppress the growth of tumors. That includes his laboratory's work on the SMARCB1 gene, whose loss drives malignant rhabdoid tumor, a rare and aggressive childhood cancer — findings that helped show how disruptions in chromatin remodeling, the machinery that controls how DNA is packaged and read, can give rise to pediatric tumors.

"Keeping my hand in that is really important to make sure that I'm still at the cutting edge of understanding where the field is, what the opportunities are," he said. "Working with other researchers is very useful input to me in helping steer our priorities. I'm a big believer in learning and growing and having input from others."

Downing, who recruited Roberts from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2015 to head St. Jude's Comprehensive Cancer Center, said Roberts has built the center into a "national treasure," according to the National Cancer Institute.

"Charlie represents a unique combination of physician, researcher and leader," Downing said in a statement to The Associated Press, adding that Roberts is "the right person at the right moment to lead this institution into the future."

Funding the mission

Part of that future will require navigating the financial constraints of treating childhood cancers, which receive less research investment from pharmaceutical companies that focus more on adult cancers, as well as federal cuts to scientific research funding.

The gap reflects scale as much as strategy: childhood cancer is rare, with roughly 15,000 children and adolescents diagnosed each year in the U.S., according to National Cancer Institute estimates, making pediatric oncology a much smaller commercial market than adult cancers and leaving philanthropy and government funding to carry more of the research burden.

Roberts said St. Jude will maintain its policy of providing treatment at no cost to patients or their families, and the hospital also plans to expand its services to make treatment available to more children around the world.

That effort builds on work already underway: St. Jude and the World Health Organization launched a global initiative in 2018 that aims to lift survival rates for the most common childhood cancers to at least 60% worldwide by 2030, a goal that matters because, according to the WHO, fewer than 30% of children with cancer in many low- and middle-income countries are cured, compared with more than 80% in high-income countries.

He said St. Jude is able to sustain this work through philanthropic support from ALSAC, the hospital's fundraising arm. According to an analysis by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, ALSAC raised an average of $2.3 billion a year in donations between 2021 and 2023, making it the second-largest fundraiser in the United States, behind only United Way.

"We can't go all the way and completely replace what pharma does," Roberts said. "But (donations) will for sure help us get more things to be successful."

Ike Anand, president and CEO of ALSAC, said he welcomes Roberts' partnership in their shared mission.

"Few people embody the promise of St. Jude quite like Charlie Roberts," Anand said. "He understands the urgency that patients and families feel, the extraordinary possibilities emerging at the intersection of science and technology, and the trust that donors place in this mission every day."

Marlo Thomas, St. Jude's national outreach director and daughter of founder Danny Thomas, said Roberts embodies the hospital's mission.

"We are closer than ever before to realizing my father's dream that no child should die in the dawn of life, thanks in large part to the work of Charlie Roberts over the past decade," she said in a statement. "I wish my father were here for this remarkable passing of the torch."

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.