Author: Jade Passey

This year has been an exciting year for our research. Read more as we share some of 2024’s best bits.

Caring for someone with a lower-grade glioma has a profound impact on the lives of carers. The Ways Ahead Project aims to better understand this to inform the best ways to support those affected.

As a charity, we’ve been to lots of scientific conferences this year, with one more to come this year. We attend these conferences to ensure that we are at the forefront of important research topics in the brain tumour field.

Researchers in Newcastle have found a key genetic variation in medulloblastomas that may pave the way for more effective targeted treatments.

Our Junior Fellow Dr Spencer Watson and his team at The Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland are researching new ways to treat glioblastoma.

This month we sponsored an event in Manchester which brought together brain tumour experts to talk about new technologies that could improve brain tumour care.

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) has announced two new calls for research into brain tumours.

The combination treatment of dabrafenib and trametinib to treat childhood gliomas is approved in England and Scotland.

With our funding, researchers in Canada have found key features in different meningiomas that can help predict tumour response to the most common treatments.

Ribociclib – a drug already used to treat breast cancer – may help slow the growth of diffuse hemispheric glioma.

An international phase 3 clinical trial has shown that vorasidenib could be a new targeted treatment for those diagnosed with a low-grade glioma.

Innovative imaging technology and machine learning developed by our Future Leader, Dr Spencer Watson, helps us understand how glioblastomas respond to treatment.

The guidelines recently published by NICE mean that NHS England will be using dabrafenib and trametinib – the first ever targeted treatment for childhood brain tumours – to treat children whose tumours have a BRAF V600E mutation.

Callum is a recent broadcast journalism graduate who used his final project to highlight his brain tumour diagnosis. Being Benign is a two part documentary where he interviews his parents, others in the brain tumour community and also a professor who works on childhood brain tumours.

The Ways Ahead project aims to find ways to support, and improve quality of life for those diagnosed with a lower-grade brain tumour. It also explores ways to help friends and family who are supporting those diagnosed.

Research that we funded nearly 20 years ago laid the foundations for last week’s approval of dabrafenib and trametinib to treat childhood gliomas.

CAR-T cell therapy is a type of immunotherapy that may be promising for treating brain tumours. There is lots of research in this field across the globe and it may one day be used more widely to treat this devastating disease.

Peter Buckle is a patient advocate and has worked with several teams, including the ARISTOCRAT team to champion research and clinical trials.

Living with a lower-grade glioma has a profound impact on those diagnosed, and their families. This is well documented anecdotally but needs to be scientifically addressed so that everyone affected by a brain tumour diagnosis gets the help and support they need.

A new nanosurgical tool – about 500 times thinner than a human hair – could help us understand how glioblastomas become resistant to radio- and chemotherapy. Up until now, no other technology has been able to do this.

Five years on, Nikki Saunders shares her experience of both her mum and brother being diagnosed with a glioblastoma.

Recent research suggests that there could be a new treatment on the horizon for some children diagnosed with low and high-grade gliomas.

Natalie McKenna-Mounty was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2020, her tumour returned in June this year, and now she is supporting our new research funding to find better glioblastoma treatments.

Zachery Eckworth, now 11 years and living in Hampshire, was just 14 months old when we was diagnosed with an optic nerve glioma.