A 16-year-old female with a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (Image source: wikimedia commons).

“Your Child has brain Cancer.”

Thousands of parents hear those words every year. For some, the diagnosis is even more devastating, when it is Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG). This is a particularly aggressive and inoperable brain tumor that strikes exclusively in children. DIPG attacks the brainstem- the control center of the brain. This region controls very basic functions, like breathing, or the child’s heartbeat. Removing the tumor is difficult and sometimes not an option. Radiation can slow the growth of the tumor, but there is no real treatment. No cure. The survival rate is near zero.

But federally funded researchers at Stanford University are rewriting the future of DIPG.

A new way to fight DIPG. Dr. Michelle Monje, a federally funded researcher at Stanford, has spent years studying how DIPG tumors grow. A DIPG tumor does not form a neat mass. Instead, it blends into the healthy brainstem tissue, entwining itself with the very cells that help a child breathe, swallow and live. This close integration were thought to make DIPG untreatable. However, one of the most important discoveries of Monje’s team was that the tumor cells weren’t just blending in: they were communicating with early born non-neuronal cells in the brain.

This discovery opened up a daring new line of attack to treat DIPG. If the communication is important for the cancer growth, then, if they could interrupt the cellular “conversation”, it might be possible to treat the cancer.

The CAR T-cell therapy approach— and a stunning Result. Monje’s team turned to CAR T-cell therapy, a cutting-edge treatment that trains a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells. It had never been used for DIPG. No one knew if it would work. They thought it would slow down the cancer. But what happened next exceeded every expectation!

One patient was completely cured. Several others had tumors that shrank significantly in size.

It is important to note that not all patients responded to CAR T cell therapy- some saw no measurable improvement, highlighting the promise of the therapy but also the urgent need for continued work.

This was the first time such dramatic responses were seen in DIPG patients. The results mark a turning point in the decades-long search for a treatment. Some patients finally have hope. Rapid progress to find cures for childhood brain cancers like DIPG heavily rely on federal funding from the National Institute of Health. Government grants helped Dr. Monje, and others explore high-risk, high-reward research that wouldn’t happen otherwise. Continued investment is essential for finding treatements for rare childhood brain cancers like DIPG.