Generously funded by Donors of Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada

Vijay Ramaswamy – Hospital for Sick Children – University of Toronto, ON

Project Title: “Leveraging therapeutic vulnerabilities of MYC amplified very high-risk childhood medulloblastoma for rational combinatorial therapy”

Description of Project:

Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumour of childhood. Currently treatments are woefully inadequate where high-risk patients are failing current therapy, and survivors are left with devastating consequences of current therapy. In addition, survival rates have been stagnant for 40 years making new approaches required. Unfortunately, despite worldwide efforts to conduct many genomic studies, a lack of mutations in medulloblastoma
has precluded us from identifying currently available therapies. As such, there is an urgent unmet need to develop new treatment approaches. This proposal seeks to test a novel new combination of drugs that are currently approved and available for other cancers. We will test this combination in the highest risk group of medulloblastoma, specifically MYC amplified Group 3 patients. Should we find that this combination is effective in our pre-clinical studies in this proposal, we can rapidly translate these findings into an early phase clinical trial, and moreover test this combination in other brain tumours that have MYC amplifications such as diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma and glioblastoma.

This work will disseminate cutting-edge AI technology to improve RT for thousands of cancer patients, and create new collaborations to accelerate the development and adoption of this technology Canada-wide.

What receiving this award means:

This award from the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada is a tremendous honour for myself and my laboratory, where it allows us to spearhead important translational work in very high-risk medulloblastoma that we hope can one day benefit patients and their families.