While survival rates for most cancers continue to improve in Australia, brain cancers aren’t seeing the same success.
While survival rates for most cancers continue to improve in Australia, brain cancers aren’t seeing the same success.
Brain cancers are the leading disease-related cause of death in Australian children. And survival rates have changed little in decades. As a paediatric oncologist, the worst conversation I can have with my patients or their parents is to tell them their tumour is incurable.
My hope is that we can replicate for brain cancer what has been achieved for leukaemia. The survival rate for the most common form of childhood leukaemia was once zero but today it’s 85%. To achieve this outcome for brain tumour patients, we will need to adopt a similar strategy as with leukaemia.
Researchers at Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne have revealed that two internal ‘clocks’ control the immune cells enlisted to fight infection.
Clomipramine’s use as a brain cancer drug comes from the fact that it can cross the blood-brain barrier, the membrane that can prevent drugs from entering.
Recent advances in drug discovery technology and molecular studies could help scientists develop a suite of potential cancer treatments that target telomerase.
In the next five to seven years, ProCan will analyse thousands of proteins in 70,000 samples of all types of cancer, generating a database that will be made accessible worldwide.
Most patients with cancer first present with symptoms to their GP, and so the GP plays a critical role in early cancer diagnosis.
Glioblastoma can affect any age group, but is more common in older people (average age of diagnosis is 64), and is somewhat more common in males.
Signalling pathways can be thought of as the language cells use to tell one another to perform a certain task, such as to grow or divide. These pathways…
Cancer in a child’s brain has the potential to impact their overall future health and cause long-term disturbances to the central nervous system of survivors.