PI: Lionel Chow, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Summary report, grand duration 2011-2013 Children who develop high-grade glioma (HGG) have a very poor prognosis. New and more effective treatment options are desperately needed to improve patient survival and quality of life. In order to better understand how these tumors grow, we are looking at a …
Eric Raabe MD, PhD One of the goals of pediatric cancer treatment is deploying personalized medicine. Treating each patient and each tumor, with exactly the right type of therapy to maximize killing of tumor cells and minimize side effects to patients is the objective. Initially, brain tumors were classified by their appearance under the microscope. …
Chuck Stiles, M.D. November 2010, Summary With the generous support of the Childhood Brain Tumor Foundation, the laboratory of Dr. Charles Stiles at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has developed pre-clinical models for testing drugs that target the PI3K signaling pathway. We have evidence that the PI3K signaling pathway may be mutated in some juvenile pilocytic astrocytomas. We …
Chin Chiang, M.D. Second-year funding 2010-2011 Medulloblastoma, the most common pediatric solid tumor, is characterized by its rapid progression and tendency to spread along the entire brain-spinal axis with poor clinical outcome. We have generated a novel mouse model of medulloblastoma by constitutively activating Shh signaling in the Gdf7-lineage. Previous studies have shown that Gdf7-expressing …
The Childhood Brain Tumor Foundation was delighted to be a silver sponsor of the ISPNO, held from June 20 through June 23, 2010, in Vienna, Austria. The ISPNO is held every two years alternating in and out of the United States. This important meeting brings together basic scientists, translational researcher, clinicians, and other medical professionals …
Africa Fernandez, Ph.D., Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center first year funding, 2010 – 2011 Medulloblastomas are brain tumors arising in the cerebellum, and they are the most common kind of solid tumor of childhood. Current treatments for these tumors leave patients with life-long damage, since the treatments affect the still-developing brain. Identifying therapies that attack the …
Philip Beachy, Ph.D. and Michelle Monje, M.D. 2010-2011 funding Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) is a devastating childhood brain tumor that is poorly understood and universally fatal. Progress to date has been limited by a lack of faithful experimental model systems. We have overcome this impasse by generating new DIPG cell lines and xenograft model …
Javad Nazarian, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Pediatrics, Children’s National Medical Center, Center for Genetic Medicine The focus of my science career changed almost three years ago when a physician colleague approached me and proposed a potentially challenging project: molecular analysis of pediatric brainstem gliomas (BSGs). The project deemed challenging because of the lack of fresh frozen …
Low-grade gliomas are the most common brain tumor in children. Although some patients can be effectively cured with surgery alone, recurrences are common in a significant majority of patients—especially those without neurofibromatosis type I (NF1). These patients often require repeated resections, chemotherapy and often radiation therapy. The damage caused by these therapies has a significant …
