A University of Newcastle research team has been awarded a $2 million National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grant to help progress its mission to develop breakthrough treatments for the most lethal form of childhood cancer, diffuse midline glioma (DMG).
Announced by Health Minister Mark Butler, as part of a $20m Australian Government initiative to combat childhood brain cancers, the NHMRC Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) grant will support the Newcastle team to build on its dedicated work developing desperately needed treatment strategies for the disease, which currently has no cure.
Lead investigator, University of Newcastle Professor of Paediatric Haematology and Oncology Matt Dun, of HMRI’s Precision Medicine Research Program, said DMG, formerly known as DIPG (Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma), was responsible for more cancer-related deaths in children and young adults than any other. “Sadly, children diagnosed with diffuse midline glioma, on average, live less than a year after their diagnosis.
Currently we lack an effective treatment like those developed for other high-risk cancers,” said Professor Dun, the Paediatric Brain Cancer stream leader for the University of Newcastle’s Mark Hughes Foundation (MHF) Centre for Brain Cancer Research.
Over the past seven years Professor Dun and his team have discovered key genetic influences that could act as possible drug targets. The team’s collective efforts have also identified new drugs and drug combinations specifically targeted at DMG.
But despite recent progress identifying vulnerabilities and completing early-stage clinical trials, they offer limited long-term survival benefit, even though therapies get into the tumour, Professor Dun explained.
“Drawing from our evolving understanding of DMG, we aim to break the cycle of past failures by administering sequential treatments that exploit tumour-specific vulnerabilities.”
The project, ‘Sequential & Temporal Therapeutic Agility for the Treatment of Diffuse Midline Glioma’, will use cutting-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence, to try and improve outcomes for children with DMG.
Using technologies and expertise spanning biomedical science, chemistry, immunology, AI, and clinical practice the team will develop a transformative multimodal treatment regimen to provide patients with meaningful survival benefits.
“Our hypothesis is that therapeutic adaptation can be identified, we can adjust treatment using optimised
technologies in real-time, before the treatment fails the patient – and in the process develop multimodal treatment strategies with the greatest likelihood of success,” Professor Dun said.
The team will develop the DMG-ADvanced mAchine-learning Precision Treatment Strategy (ADAPTS) to guide therapeutic management of DMG patients. Using tumour, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood immune cell profiling,
ADAPTS will identify optimal treatments and predict sequential and temporal adjustments.
“Our vision is to establish effective, life-sustaining treatment options for patients by harnessing tumour and immune cell signatures in response to treatment by partnering with consumers, pharmaceutical industries, computational experts and providers.”
Professor Dun described the $2 million NHMRC MRFF grant as a crucial step toward tackling the most devastating disease.
“It honours the memory of the 20 to 25 Australian children who die from DMG each year and provides hope to future families facing this unimaginable diagnosis. Our goal is to find solutions that offer these children a chance at life,” Professor Dun said.
$20 million funding boost for childhood brain cancer research
The Australian Government’s investment of $20 million in funding for Australian researchers will support their groundbreaking national research to give new hope to Australian children, adolescents and young adults with childhood brain cancers, including Diffuse Midline Glioma (DMG).
The Australian government’s $20 million commitment is divided into two streams:
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