13-Year-Old’s Rare Brain Tumor… Vanished!

After taking part in a study conducted in France, a young patient has been completely cured of his brain cancer, and the promising results are giving hope for a more effective treatment against the deadly type of brain tumor.

“Lucas beat all the odds”, says Dr. Jacques Grill, BIOMEDE’s lead researcher. At 13, the boy remained cancer-free. “Over a series of MRI scans, I watched as the tumor completely disappeared.”

Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG is a rare yet highly aggressive form of cancer since the tumor is located within the brainstem, rendering surgery to remove it useless. The average survival time is nine to ten months. The Biological Medicine for DIPG Eradication (BIOMEDE) study compared the effectiveness of three cancer drugs – erlotinib, everolimus, and dasatinib – against a biopsy of each patient’s tumor, thus analyzing the molecular profile of each cancer. The study ran from 2014 to 2019, and out of the 233 patients enrolled, only Lucas saw his tumor vanish entirely. “Lucas’s tumor had an extremely rare mutation which we believe made its cells far more sensitive to [everolimus],” which might be the reason why he was more responsive to treatment than others. Scientists are looking to successfully reproduce the properties seen in Lucas’s DIPG so they can use lab-grown cells to test new drugs.