How AI could help treat brain tumors in children

Researchers are studying how artificial intelligence (AI) could help identify new treatments for children with brain tumors, reports News.ro.

Currently, young people with the most aggressive form of the disease are unlikely to survive more than a year.

Although it is rare, around 420 children are diagnosed with brain cancer each year in the UK alone.

The team at Cancer Research UK’s Center of Excellence for Children’s Brain Tumors in Cambridge will be looking at whether AI could help identify new treatments, as they look for ways to improve survival rates, the BBC reports.

Experts say immunotherapy has changed the way cancer is treated, but it doesn’t always work for brain tumors.

Dr. Elizabeth Cooper, one of the researchers working on the project, said that a child’s brain tumor is different from an adult’s.

“The brain is changing all the time as children grow,” she said.

This may be one reason why immunotherapy, which uses the body’s own immune system to kill cancer cells, has had little success in treating brain tumors.

“Immunotherapy has changed the way we treat cancer, but it doesn’t always work for brain tumors,” said Dr. Cooper.

“What we found when we talk about the brain is that it has its own immune system, but we still don’t know how to use it,” said the doctor.

Experts are aware that new drugs are needed to treat this cancer in children.

The group is in the early stages of research trying to understand what this could mean for treatment.

“We need to design new drugs to treat children’s cancer,” says Dr. Richard Gilbertson, one of the center’s directors, referring to drugs that are “less toxic and harmful” to children.

The center received funding of several million euros, and part of the money will be spent on using AI to create digital models of the most complex brain tumors.

“We will be able to use the models to test our treatments in virtual clinical trials and hopefully identify treatments that are gentler on children, compared to radiation therapy, for example, which can have terrible side effects to have ” Gilbert.