Recipient: Professor Brandon Wainwright
Institute: The Institute of Molecular Bioscience
Funding: $224,936 July 2018 to June 2020
Testing new combination treatment
Brain tumours are the most common cause of cancer related death in adolescents, children and infants. Despite advances in many fields of cancer treatments, overall survival in paediatric brain tumours has remained static for the last 30 years.
Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant paediatric brain tumour. The effects of current treatments including radiotherapy and chemotherapy have devastating effects on the growing brain. Less than one in 20 long-term survivors are capable of leading independent lives due to intellectual disability and a variety of other side effects such as peripheral neuropathy and deafness.
The Wainwright laboratory has discovered that palbociclib, a drug recently approved to treat women with late stage breast cancer, can be repurposed to great effect to treat medulloblastoma in children.
Funding will be used to progress that finding to an international trial by initiating further laboratory experiments to test how the drug works in combination with standard therapy, in this case chemotherapy.
Ultimately, the result of experiments will define the optimal combination of palbociclib and standard chemotherapy to improve survival and mitigate post-treatment tumour recurrence for children with medulloblastoma.