Powerful Anti-Cancer Drug for Children with DIPG!

DIPG (Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma) is a universally fatal childhood cancer of the brain.

• This horrific disease strikes early (most often between the ages of 5 and 10), and it strikes hard.
   
• Children diagnosed with the disease are expected to live less than a year, and fewer than 1% will survive the disease.
   
• Standard clinical approaches such as chemotherapy and radiation have done little to improve outcomes, and often hurt far more than they help.

 Nonetheless, the scientific community has not been idle.  With your donation, we can continue to develop new treatments for cancers such as DIPG. Dr. Charles Keller, the scientific director of cc-TDI, led an international Children’s Oncology Group preclinical consortium dedicated to finding a new potential therapy for DIPG. This global effort resulted in the identification of panobinostat as a promising treatment for DIPG, leading to a major publication in Nature Medicine (1) and a clinical trial currently underway (PBTC-047). Panobinostat shows great promise as a treatment, but it may not be the ultimate cure for DIPG. And so we at cc-TDI have been hard at work identifying new possible treatments for DIPG. Our extensive DNA and RNA sequencing efforts have resulted in the identification of a cell surface protein highly expressed in DIPG tumor tissue, but almost absent in normal brain tissue. These results derive from the largest set of sequenced DIPG samples. This means we can selectively target DIPG cancer cells by attaching powerful anti-cancer drugs to DIPG cells. This work is almost through peer review at a scientific journal, and will be published shortly. And that means the real effort of validating the new therapeutic target and turning it into the next clinical trial for DIPG is ready to begin! Each September we hope to raise much needed awareness of childhood cancers but we can’t do that without your help.  Please donate to stop fatal childhood cancers!   Visit Us.  Be inspired.  DONATE TODAY.   By Noah E. Berlow, PhD  |  Postdoctoral FellowChildren’s Cancer Therapy Development Institute   (1) Grasso, C.S. et al. Functionally defined therapeutic targets in diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma. Nat Med (2015).