Funded by the Dick Vitale Pediatric Cancer Research Fund
Diffuse midline glioma (DMG) is a very aggressive brain tumor that occurs mostly in children. DMG treatment involves surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, but most people with DMG don’t live longer than a year despite these treatments. We desperately need better therapies for this disease. Treating DMG is difficult because tumors aren’t the same in every person, so a drug that works for one person might not work for another. Therefore, we need treatments that are personalized for each patient. In addition, different parts of the tumor may not all respond to the same drugs, and we might need to use a mixture of drugs to eliminate the whole tumor. And even if we find drugs that do this in the lab, getting them into the tumor is tricky because of the “blood-brain barrier”, which prevents many drugs from getting from the bloodstream into the brain. We are proposing a new approach to DMG treatment that overcomes these challenges. To find individualized treatments, we will test many different drugs on tissue from surgery or biopsy to see which ones work best for each patient. We’ll also look at the effects of drugs on individual cells in the tumor and find the combinations of drugs that kill the most tumor cells. Finally, we’ll use a method called convection enhanced delivery (CED) to pump drugs directly into the tumor, bypassing the blood-brain barrier. By using these approaches, we will find better treatments for DMG and other brain tumors in kids.
