Global NewsNews

Newcastle University research leads to breakthrough in childhood brain cancer

Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumour in children and relapse following initial treatment

A scientific breakthrough has enabled experts to predict relapse in a common childhood cancer and means doctors can tailor treatment for each individual child and improve prognosis.

Research by Newcastle University has revealed that experts can identify the time, nature and outcome of medulloblastoma relapse from the biology of the disease at diagnosis and the initial therapy received. The study, published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, shows that different biological and treatment groups within the disease relapse at different times and with different patterns of spread throughout the body.

Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumour in children and relapse following initial treatment – surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy – has a grave prognosis.

Around 70 children are diagnosed with the cancer each year in the UK. Relapse occurs in around 30 per cent of children, usually within five years of diagnosis.

The Newcastle research identifies which patients are most at risk of continuing problems with the disease and provides the ability to fine-tune treatment and surveillance to improve the child’s prognosis.

Professor Steve Clifford, Director of Newcastle University’s Centre for Cancer, who led the research, said the findings can be applied immediately in medical clinics to help disease monitoring, advance treatment decisions and improve quality of life after relapse.

He said, “Our research is an exciting development for the treatment of medulloblastoma patients and it will help improve clinical outcomes. Our study allowed us to undertake biology-directed disease surveillance after initial treatment, in other words to gather and analyse a large amount of data on patients’ tumours, looking out for particular types of relapse in particular groups of patients. This revealed that some patient biological groups relapse later and therefore need to be monitored longer as it is not a one-size-fits-all approach to tackling this kind of brain tumour. Our findings also mean that we can now predict the course of the disease following a relapse and tailor treatments, enabling us to improve how we manage these patients through more personalised approaches based on understanding their individual disease.”

For the study, 247 young patients around the globe with relapsed medullblastoma were monitored. Clifford explained, “For a while we thought these differences in medulloblastoma relapse might exist. To test this we gathered the largest set of data worldwide on these relapsed patients to allow us to investigate possible relationships and define the nature of the cancer accurately for clinical application. We now need to understand the biological mechanisms which underlie these findings, and whether these give rise to opportunities to develop new, more effective therapies for the disease.”

The lead author of the study, Dr Rebecca Hill, has been awarded an MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship to work on this area for the next five years.

 

 

Support us in our endeavor to bring you Advertisement free content.
Choose your options to donate or subscribe.

Tags

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button
Close
Close