Funded by the Dick Vitale Pediatric Cancer Research Fund
Brain cancer is an unwelcome guest that sneaks into a kid’s brain. Doctors can usually see and take out the cancer, but it gets really difficult when the cancer enters normal brain areas. This sneaky move by cancer is called invasion. The problem is that these cancer cells are so small and tricky that even our best medical scanners can’t find them. It is like the cancer is playing a game of hide-and-seek in the kid’s brain and escaping from the doctor’s tools.We know some of the places the cancer hides, but we don’t understand why it chooses certain paths or how it moves so easily. So, what we did was take a super close-up look at how brain cancer behaves using a special research tool. This is a way to see exactly what is going on inside individual cancer cells. Our first look tells us that brain cancers are like masters of disguise — they can look like normal brain cells, especially when they are hiding among them, and it seems they might even be “talking” to the normal cells around them.We will dive deep into how these cancer cells chat with healthy brain cells and what special tools or genes they use to travel so well. We believe figuring this out could put the brakes on cancer’s sneaky move. It could lead to new treatments that stop their play and talk, making treatment much more effective and helping many kids.
