Cancer Center researcher studies unique behavior of pediatric brain tumors

Phoenix; Pratiti (Mimi) Bandopadhayay, MBBS, PhD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; and David Jones, PhD, of the German Cancer Research Center have been awarded a $1.2 million grant from the Team Jack Foundation to study pediatric low-grade gliomas. 

Low-grade gliomas are one of the most common types of brain tumors and are associated with overall better survival outcomes, but these tumors and associated treatments still have a large impact on quality of life for kids, Phoenix said. 

“There’s been progress the past decade, and just last year there were multiple new drugs approved by the FDA that show efficacy and promise,” said Phoenix, PhD, a Cancer Center researcher and associate professor in UC’s James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy. “But we still don’t have a curative therapy for low-grade gliomas.” 

Clinician researchers, including Bandopadhayay, have found that low-grade gliomas behave in a unique start-and-stop pattern over the course of a patient’s childhood.  

“Patients can display symptoms and get diagnosed with a low-grade glioma, but it doesn’t always continuously grow,” Phoenix said. “Patients are closely monitored and may be stable for a while — years even — and then it could grow between checkups and then stop again.” 

If medical teams are able to manage the start-and-stop pattern during childhood, Phoenix said the tumors are highly unlikely to continue growing after a patient reaches early adulthood. But it’s unknown why this pattern occurs during childhood and why the tumors rarely grow in adulthood. 

Using experience from developing models of pediatric high-grade gliomas, Phoenix and his colleagues will develop new models of pediatric low-grade gliomas to better understand their biology and growth patterns across brain development and maturation. 

“There’s really no good model for this disease, so we’ll be using our system to try to understand how these tumor cells interact with the normal brain during development and how that influences the start-and-stop growth pattern that they see in the clinic,” he said. “If we can improve and understand why this occurs and why after a certain age the chance of growth diminishes, then hopefully we can develop therapies that target these interactions.” 

Phoenix said the knowledge gained in this research may also apply to adult low-grade gliomas, which are more likely to continue to grow and do not typically display the start-and-stop pattern. 

The Team Jack Foundation’s mission is to raise money to fund impactful pediatric brain cancer research and work to create national awareness for the disease. Its namesake, the late Jack Hoffman, courageously battled brain cancer for 14 years, memorably scored a touchdown for the University of Nebraska at age 7, and became a catalyst for pediatric brain cancer fundraising and research. 

“Any time we receive funding from a family and their foundation, it really means the world to us. We do our research for them. They’re the driving force and the motivation,” Phoenix said. “We have Jack’s picture hanging up in the lab, and he inspires us every day. It’s extremely inspirational to be able to do the work related to this project and try to advance our understanding of the underlying biology of low-grade gliomas.”

Featured photo at top of Phoenix working in his lab. Photo/Andrew Higley/UC Marketing + Brand.