SU2C gives £7.5m more to improve treatments for children’s and young people’s cancers

We’re getting better and better at treating cancer in children and young people.  

Thanks to research, the number of children in the UK (aged 0-15) who survive their cancer has more than doubled since the 1970s. Today, more than 8 in 10 children and young people (aged 0-24) will survive for at least 10 years.  

That’s a big improvement, but there’s still much more to do. Today’s treatments still don’t work for all children and young people, and they can cause difficult long-term side effects.  

That’s why the Stand Up To Cancer Paediatric New Discoveries Challenge Awards are so important. 

For round two of the awards, Stand Up To Cancer in the US and our Stand Up To Cancer campaign are giving two international teams each a further £3.75m (US$5m) in funding to drive progress for children and young people with cancer.  

One team is working to reduce the side effects of our current brain tumour treatments by studying exactly what they do to children’s and young people’s brains. The other is finding and testing specific drug combinations that could give us new ways of treating medulloblastoma and neuroblastoma.

Reducing radiotherapy side effects for children and young people with brain tumours

Most brain tumour treatment plans involve radiotherapy.  

Powerful radiation kills cancer cells, but it can also damage healthy ones. That’s a problem because our brains are sensitive – it’s why they’re protected by our skulls – and they have a lot of growing and developing to do before we become adults.  

Radiotherapy can disrupt that development. Around 2 in every 3 children and young people whose brain tumours are treated with radiotherapy face long-term side effects that can have lasting impacts on their education, jobs and relationships. 

For the BRAINatomy study, led by Professor Martin McCabe from the University of Manchester, researchers are using data from MRI scans to create a map of the developing brain based on how it responds to different types of radiation. Just as you might ask your phone to help you avoid road traffic, doctors could use the BRAINatomy team’s map to plan routes for their radiotherapy beams that avoid the busiest, or most sensitive, areas of their patients’ brains. That should mean they can minimise the risk of long-term side effects. 

In fact, in the first part of the study, researchers in Manchester led by Professor Marianne Aznar found a small area in the front of developing brains where increased exposure to radiation seems to correlate with reductions in processing speed, which is very closely linked with how well people do at school. BRAINatomy’s biologists, led by Dr Lara Barazzuol at the University Medical Centre Groningen in the Netherlands, are now trying to find the specific cells and brain pathways that might be responsible for that effect. 

“The smaller and more specific the region we can identify, the easier it is to spare it from a radiotherapy perspective,” explains Aznar. “We’ll never be able to spare the whole frontal lobe of the brain, but if it’s a smaller area, then we have a real chance at rearranging our beams to try to decrease the dose there as much as possible.” 

In part two of BRAINatomy, the researchers will widen their focus and find out whether a newer form of radiotherapy, called proton beam therapy, makes it easier to spare sensitive parts of the brain. They’ll also set up a clinical trial to work out how doctors can make the best use of hormone replacement therapy to reduce or prevent side effects.  

Improving immunotherapy for children’s and young people’s cancers

Radiotherapy has been an important element of cancer treatment for well over a century. The other team receiving £3.75m in further funding are working on something that has started making a difference much more recently: immunotherapy.  

Led by Professor John Anderson at the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in London, this team have developed a new way of using immunotherapy drugs to treat the brain tumour medulloblastoma and the nerve cell cancer neuroblastoma. 

Specifically, they’ve combined breakthrough CAR-T cells (immune cells altered by scientists to track down the specific features of patient’s cancers) with immune modulator drugs, which can help people’s overall immune systems work more effectively.  

CAR-T cell therapy is already saving lives, but it’s currently only available as a treatment for blood cancers. Just as doctors need help to guide their radiotherapy beams away from sensitive parts of the brain, these cells need support to be able to break down solid tumours. 

The evidence Anderson’s team have gathered since 2021 suggests immune modulator drugs can provide that support. Their approach could finally make CAR-T cell therapies an effective way of treating solid tumours in children and young people. That’s important because, despite some important discoveries in recent years, children and young people with neuroblastoma and medulloblastoma are still less likely to survive their disease than children with blood cancers like leukaemia and lymphoma. 

With the new funding, the team will get to work on a clinical trial to test their new treatment combination in children and young people with neuroblastoma. They’ll also keep refining and developing further treatment combinations for both neuroblastoma and medulloblastoma.