Growing tumours grows hope for children with cancer

Diffuse Pontine Glioma (DIPG) may not be particularly well known, but according to oncologist Dr David Ziegler, it is “one of the most common and the most aggressive brain tumours we see in kids”. Because the tumour is located in the most sensitive part of the brain, it has been impossible to study and therefore impossible to cure. Most children with a DIPG die within 12 months.

Now, Dr Ziegler and colleagues from the Children’s Cancer Institute of Australia (CCIA) have set out to grow their own tumours in the institute’s ACRF Drug Discovery Centre. The cells were harvested from tumours donated by the parents of children who had died from the disease.

“We thought, ‘Well, if we can harvest these tumours after a donation, maybe we can actually get the cells to grow’,” explained Dr Ziegler. “If we can get them to grow in the lab, maybe we can start a screening program and see if we can find any new and exciting treatments.”

Achieving funding for the project was initially difficult because growing cells from tumours taken after death was thought to be impossible. But the team was supported by researchers at Stanford University in the US, who were able to grow their own cells and share them with the CCIA, as well as fundraising efforts by parents.

The drug screening program is conducted by a multimillion-dollar robotic machine - one of only two in Australia. The machine is automated to place the cells in 96-well plates, then add a different drug to each plate.

“Within a day, you can literally test thousands of different drugs,” said Dr Ziegler. “In the first batch we tested about 1200 drugs; that literally took just a few hours.”

Excitedly, Dr Ziegler states that some of the drugs which have been tested, which have already been approved for other conditions, appear to be killing the tumour cells.

“Our next step is that we need to confirm that, so we need to repeat those tests, take the ones that seem most active, try and see that it’s reproducible, and test that extensively across the different cell lines and in different models. If we are able to prove that some of these drugs are effective, then ultimately our aim would be to take them to do a clinical trial.”

The research is thus extremely important for treating DIPGs, with Dr Ziegler admitting that up until recently, there have been no advances for the past 50 years.

“There’s no more difficult conversation you can have with a parent than to tell them that their child has a DIPG and that there’s no treatment that we have,” said Dr Ziegler. “The aim of this research is to make sure that we don’t have to have those conversations anymore.”