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Early last year, at his home in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Jesus Apolinaris Cruz’s leg hurt so much he could barely sleep. “All day,” the 13-year-old recalls. “It was constant pain.” His parents took him to two local pediatricians, who examined him, drew blood, tested his platelets. No diagnosis. Finally, in April 2016, a physician ordered an MRI. No wonder Jesus’s leg hurt. He had a large, cancerous tumor lodged in his hip. …
Last September, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that brain tumors have overtaken the much more common leukemia as the leading cause of death from pediatric cancer. Although progress has been made and the promise of more progress is on the horizon, the cure rate for childhood brain tumors lags behind a number of other pediatric cancers.
As pediatric neuro-oncologist Peter Manley, MD, of Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center told Live Science, new research on cancer genomics “is so impressive that my feeling is that we will continue to see a decline in deaths.”
To mark Brain Tumor Awareness Month, Mark Kieran, MD, PhD, clinical director of the Brain Tumor Center at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s, will host a webchat on Monday, May 22 (3:30 p.m. ET). The live chat will highlight the latest research and treatments for pediatric brain tumors. Here’s a look back at some recent developments: …
“It’s a brutal disease; there’s just no other way to describe DIPG,” says Steve Czech. “And what’s crazy is that there aren’t many treatment options because it’s such a rare, orphan disease.”
Czech’s son, Mikey, was diagnosed with a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) on Jan. 6, 2008. It was Mikey’s 11th birthday. The fast growing and difficult-to-treat brainstem tumors are diagnosed in approximately 300 children in the U.S. each year.
Sadly, the virtually incurable disease comes with a poor prognosis for most children. The location of DIPG tumors in the brainstem — which controls many of the body’s involuntary functions, such as breathing — has posed a huge challenge to successful treatment thus far.
“Typically, they give kids about nine months,” says Czech. “Our lives changed forever the day that Mikey was diagnosed.” …
Sometimes a scientific idea takes a long time to make its way forward. Angiogenesis is a case in point. As surgeon-in-chief at Boston Children’s Hospital, Judah Folkman, MD, noted that malignant tumors often had a bloody appearance. In The New England Journal of Medicine in 1971, he hypothesized that tumors cannot grow beyond a certain size without a dedicated blood supply, and that “successful” tumors secrete an unknown substance that encourages blood vessel growth, or angiogenesis.
If angiogenesis could be blocked, he argued, tumors might not grow or spread. Rather than waging a toxic chemical and radiation battle with a tumor, one could starve it into submission by shutting down its blood supply.
The idea was roundly criticized. …
Clinicians have long known that children with Down syndrome carry an elevated risk of developing acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common pediatric cancer. Research consistently shows that children with Down syndrome are more likely to suffer complications from chemotherapy. At the same time, some studies have suggested that children with Down syndrome and ALL may have a higher chance of relapsing.
What to do with this knowledge has been a source of controversy. Should patients with ALL and Down syndrome receive treatment modified to minimize toxicity from chemotherapy? Or should they be given the same treatment as other children with ALL to minimize the chance for relapse? Recent study results from Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center suggest that full-dose chemo is preferable. …
When Danny Powers showed gross motor delays and poor balance as a toddler, early intervention specialists told his mother, Christi, that the problem was likely weak muscle tone. But when Danny developed severe headaches at age 4 during a family vacation, Christi took him to a local emergency room, where a CT scan revealed a mass in his head. His eventual diagnosis back home in Massachusetts was low-grade glioma, the most common pediatric brain tumor.
Fortunately, low-grade gliomas are non-malignant, slow-growing and highly curable, and most children can look forward to decades of survival. Unfortunately, the standard treatment — chemotherapy and, in some cases, radiation, in addition to surgery — is toxic and can damage the developing brain and body. Moreover, the tumors often regrow, requiring retreatment. By the time Danny was 13, he had been treated twice with surgery and once with a year of chemotherapy, which Mark Kieran, MD, PhD, clinical director of the Brain Tumor Center at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, likens to carpet bombing.
Instead of undergoing another course of chemotherapy when his tumor regrew yet again, Danny entered a clinical trial of a new, targeted drug that acts more like a guided missile — aimed directly at his cancer-causing mutation. …
A new color-coding tool is enabling scientists to better track live blood stem cells over time, a key part of understanding how blood disorders and cancers like leukemia arise, report researchers in Boston Children’s Hospital’s Stem Cell Research Program.
In Nature Cell Biology today, they describe the use of their tool in zebrafish to track blood stem cells the fish are born with, the clones (copies) these cells make of themselves and the types of specialized blood cells they give rise to (red cells, white cells and platelets). Leonard Zon, MD, director of the Stem Cell Research Program and a senior author on the paper, believes the tool has many implications for hematology and cancer medicine since zebrafish are surprisingly similar to humans genetically. …
Although current treatments can cure 80 to 90 percent of cases, acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) remains the second leading cause of cancer deaths in children. Patients with a resistant form of the disease, who relapse following successful treatment or who have other high risk features have few treatment options. Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is also difficult to treat in children.
In a first-of-its-kind study, investigators at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center are testing precision cancer medicine in children and young adults with relapsed or high-risk leukemias. The goal is to determine whether powerful next-generation DNA sequencing can spot mutations or genetic changes in leukemia cells that can be targeted by cancer drugs. …
Cancer remains the leading disease-related cause of death in children in the United States. Yet, when it comes to cancer research funding and drug development, pediatric cancer is often left behind, writes David A. Williams, MD, president of Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, in Boston Globe Media’s STAT.
Although there are more than 150 types of childhood cancer, pediatric cancer receives only a small fraction of NIH and National Cancer Institute funding, Williams writes. Yet, he points out, just as breakthroughs in adult cancer research can help children, breakthroughs in pediatric cancer can also benefit adults.
Williams and other members of the Coalition for Pediatric Medical Research recently met with the staff of Vice President Joseph Biden, leader of the federal government’s cancer moonshot. Their message? Make sure that pediatric cancer is represented on the moonshot.
An occasional roundup of news items Vector finds noteworthy.
We haven’t curbed the Zika epidemic yet. But cryo-electron microscopy — a newer, faster alternative to X-ray crystallography — at least reveals the structure of the virus, which has been linked to microcephaly (though not yet definitively). The anatomy of the virus’s projections gives clues to how the virus is able to attach to and infect cells, and could provide toeholds for developing antiviral treatments and vaccines. Read coverage in the Washington Post and see the full paper in Science.
Meanwhile, as The New York Times reports, scientists are coming together in an effort to control Zika by genetically manipulating the mosquito that spreads it, Aedes aegypti. …