Our research funding has spanned across many brain tumour types and has led to significant research findings that bring us closer to helping those affected by a brain tumour diagnosis.
We are committed to not only improving people’s lives, but also changing the research landscape to ensure that brain tumours have the dedicated research funding they deserve.
Our global research funding has created networks of world-class researchers across the UK, USA, Europe, Australia and South Africa.
Without your support, we couldn’t fund this vital research to accelerate a cure for brain tumours.
Five ways our research has made an impact this year
1. Approval of dabrafenib and trametinib to treat childhood gliomas
One of the most significant breakthroughs this year was the approval of dabrafenib and trametinib to treat children with high- and low-grade gliomas.
This approval was decades in the making. And research we funded nearly 20 years ago to explore BRAF mutations in low-grade childhood brain tumours laid the foundations for the new drug combination discovery.
This new treatment marks the first in decades and is the first ever targeted treatment for children. It has the potential to improve survival and quality of life for children diagnosed with gliomas with a BRAF V600E mutation.
It is important to acknowledge that while this was my PhD project, this work could not have been achieved without the collaboration between researchers. The scientific community must work together to understand this complex group of brain tumours and improve treatment options for children – and this is how the EVEREST Centre was born.
Dr David Jones
Dr David Jones
2. New insights to improve our understanding of meningiomas
Meningiomas are the most common primary brain tumour in adults. Many of these tumours can be successfully removed with surgery, but some can behave more aggressively than others.
With our funding, researchers in Canada led by Dr Gelareh Zadeh, analysed data from nearly 3,000 meningiomas collected around the world. They found key features across different meningiomas that can help predict tumour response to the most common treatments.
Some of their key findings show that the complete removal of a meningioma during surgery reduces the likelihood of it growing back. This was also true for more aggressive meningiomas, but to a lesser extent.
Additionally, the team have created a model to predict tumour response to radiotherapy. They hope this will tailor surgical and radiotherapy approaches and improve the lives of those facing a meningioma diagnosis.
One of the most challenging clinical decisions to make in the care of meningioma patients is deciding which patients should receive radiation treatment after surgery for their tumour. This research could help us in this decision, which could help improve people's lives.
Dr Gelareh Zadeh
3. Using novel imaging to understand how glioblastomas resist treatment
Glioblastomas are one of the most aggressive brain tumours and are notoriously resistant to current therapies, making them difficult to treat.
Our Future Leader, Dr Spencer Watson, is using innovative imaging technology and machine learning to understand how glioblastomas respond to, and resist treatment. This is the first time that scientists have been able to see glioblastoma cells relative to all other cells that surround the tumour.
This pre-clinical work showed that immune cells undergo extensive changes in response of radiotherapy. They also showed that treatment can inadvertently cause scarring in the brain and that tumours often regrow next to scarred regions.
This scarring creates a protective environment for glioblastoma cells that do not die during treatment, allowing them to remain dormant and hide them from the immune system.
This knowledge is helping us to understand how glioblastoma cells resist treatment. It also emphasises the importance of understanding the environment around the tumour if we are going to develop new treatments to find a cure for this devastating disease.
This research helps us understand the different ways brain tumours can resist and survive treatments such as radiotherapy, which in turns helps us find better ways to specifically target these survival strategies to improve our therapies.
Dr Spencer Watson
4. Potential new drug target for rare childhood brain tumour
Diffuse hemispheric glioma is an aggressive childhood brain tumour which has a prognosis of 18-22 months and no standard of care.
Research we’ve funded at ICR with Professor Chris Jones aimed to uncover clues about how these tumour cells behave. The work focussed on a sub-type with a specific DNA mutation, known as H3G34-mutant.
Chris and his team found a key weakness in these cells that could be targeted by a drug that already exists to treat some types of breast cancer – a drug called ribociclib.
This research started in laboratory and pre-clinical models and then transitioned to trialling ribociclib in a child when other treatments had failed. This resulted in stable disease for 17 months after first- and second-line treatment. The child’s tumour has since grown back and they are receiving further treatment, more than four years since their diagnosis.
Although the treatment has only been tested in one child so far, the results were remarkable.
From this research, we know that ribociclib isn’t a cure for this devastating brain tumour as it slows the growth of tumour cells and doesn’t kill them. But it could pave the way for future drug combinations to be explored in clinical trials.
This work shows the importance of understanding how brain tumours develop in order to figure out better ways to treat these patients. We were able to use this research to find specific vulnerabilities in cancer cells which hopefully we can now translate into clinical trials.
Professor Chris Jones
5. Finding kinder treatments for medulloblastoma
Medulloblastoma is one of the most common childhood brain tumours. Current treatments are harsh and have a huge impact on a child’s quality of life, so new therapies are urgently needed.
The INSTINCT project, which was part-funded by us in 2014, aimed to bridge the gap between understanding tumour biology in the laboratory and translating this into new treatments.
The work focussed on finding targeted treatments for children to improve survival, reduce the severe side effects of treatment and improve children’s quality of life.
Professor Steve Clifford at the University of Newcastle and his team focussed on Group 3 medulloblastoma. This is a particularly aggressive tumour subtype.
They studied over 1600 medulloblastomas and found important differences in clinical outcomes for children diagnosed with medulloblastoma, highlighting the need for new and better treatment approaches.
With this knowledge, researchers explored a kinder and more effective way of treating this disease and tested drugs that help to slow tumour growth in pre-clinical models.
Research will continue to understand the best ways to treat these aggressive tumours, aiming to pave the way for future clinical trials to treat this group of medulloblastoma.
In our latest studies, we have identified an important group of these tumours which are essentially incurable using current therapies, and how to recognise them diagnostically. These studies provide the essential diagnostic characteristics that can immediately be used to identify this critical tumour group in the clinic, as well as helping in the development of new therapies.
Professor Steve Clifford
Looking forward to 2025
Each of these highlights is an incredible example of the progress you’ve helped us make towards our goal of accelerating a cure for brain tumours.
But we’re not stopping there, we look forward to 2025 where we will fund more pioneering research and support new research to improve quality of life and translation of research to the clinic to have a more direct benefit for the brain tumour community.
This year has been an incredible year for our funded research. With our support, researchers have made significant advances in knowledge and uncovered important clues that will help us find more effective treatments for brain tumours. None of this would be possible without the amazing team of researchers we fund, scientific advisors and our dedicated research team who make sure we fund the very best research. As the largest dedicated funder of research into primary brain tumours, we fund everything from early laboratory research to clinical trials, and pioneering work to improve quality of life for people in the brain tumour community. I am extremely proud of what we have achieved this year and look forward to more success in 2025.
Dr Simon Newman – Our Chief Scientific Officer