Survival rates for pediatric cancers have improved to an impressive 80%–90% in recent years, and much of the boost is due to early detection of tumors and treatment with some well-established interventions, including surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. So doctors hope that the Pediatric Cancer Genome Project, a three-year, $65 million effort to sequence major pediatric cancers, will become a rich source of new targets for therapies. Understanding the genetic drivers of cancers can hopefully reveal common pathways among different types of cancers, allowing doctors to borrow treatments effective against one type of tumor to treat another, for example, or to generate entirely new drugs for thwarting cells that grow abnormally. It’s the future of cancer treatment that may bump survival rates even higher.