Glioma that affects the brain stem is rare but fatal, and is one of the most dangerous forms of brain cancer in children, but a unique case in the world of a child being cured of it has raised high hopes in French research circles.
Despite the progress achieved in treating a number of types of childhood cancer, whose World Day falls on Thursday, cerebral glioma, which affects between 50 and 100 children and adolescents every year in France, represents a challenge to medicine.
Although the five-year survival rate for childhood cancer cases has reached 85%, treating some of these cases is difficult, including diffuse intrinsic dendritic glioma.
This tumor cannot be removed with surgery, so doctors usually resort to radiation therapy, which sometimes helps slow the disease, but its effect is temporary. To date, no medicine has proven its effectiveness.
baby “luca”
The growth of this tumor is indeed very rapid, and generally leads to the death of the patient within a period ranging between nine and 12 months after its discovery.
However, the Belgian child Luca, who is currently 13 years old, defied all expectations, as he was discovered to have this initially incurable disease when he was six years old, but it is now considered that he has been cured, as tumor signs no longer appear in his brain.
His doctor, Jacques Grill, who directs the brain tumors program in the children’s cancer department at the Gustave Roussy Cancer Center south of Paris, said, “Luca has blown away all the meters of life.”
The pediatrician recounted with emotion that he told Luca’s parents seven years ago that their son was going to die.
That day, his family moved to France to enable him to receive treatment, and the young child was one of the first patients to join a clinical trial to test a new drug, a targeted treatment.
From the beginning, Luca responded very well to treatment. The MRI results showed time after time to Dr. Grell that “the tumor had completely disappeared.”
However, despite these miraculous results, he did not dare to decide to stop the medication, until he realized a year and a half ago that the child himself had stopped taking it.
The doctor, whose team began conducting research into this cancer about 15 years ago, added, “It is not scientifically possible that there is a case like this in the world.”
Researchers are currently focusing on finding out why Luca has recovered, and how to turn his medical condition into a source of hope for hundreds of young people in the future.
About ten other children included in the clinical trial are still alive years after their infection was discovered, and their average life expectancy has exceeded the age reported by statistics, but their tumors have not completely disappeared.
“New therapeutic path”
Dr. Grill believed that the increased life expectancy was due to “biological characteristics of their tumors,” which explained their better response than other patients undergoing treatment.
“Luca’s tumor was a very rare variant,” noted the pediatrician, who is also a researcher at the National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm). He added, “We believe that this mutant is what made his cancer cells more susceptible to the drug.”
In an ongoing trial conducted by the pharmaceutical company Biomed, which compares the drug Luca received with a promising new drug, researchers at the Gustave Roussy Center are not only studying the genetic abnormalities of all patients’ tumors, but are also manufacturing tumor organoids (which are three-dimensional copies of patients’ tumors prepared in the laboratory). , to understand its biological composition and how it is affected by medications.
The professor and researcher supervising this work, Mary Ann Debili, said, “Luca’s case opens up real hope, and we will try in the laboratory to reproduce the changes we observed in his cells.”
In practice, medical teams are seeking to discover whether the DNA changes that appeared in Luca also lead to the shrinkage of other patients’ tumors once they “reproduce” them.
If this turns out to be the case, “the next step will be to find a drug that produces the same effect of these cellular changes on cancer cells,” says Mary Ann DeBelli.
However, doctors who are enthusiastic about this new “treatment path” warn that it will take years before finding what could be a cure.
Jack Grill explained, “It takes an average of 10 or 15 years (…) and is therefore a long-term work.”
2024-02-13 20:58:25
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