Have you wondered how a researcher spends their time, or the highs and lows that come with working on children’s cancer? This week, I sat down with Dr Maria Victoria Niklison Chirou, lecturer and researcher at the University of Bath. Alongside teaching students, she has a small research group working on medulloblastoma, a rare type of childhood brain tumour that can be very difficult to treat. Maria is currently working on a Little Princess Trust project, funded in partnership with CCLG, called ‘Developing novel drugs for Medulloblastoma'.
Here’s what she had to say about working as a researcher…
Hello and thank you very much for joining me today, Maria. I thought we’d start at the beginning, by asking why did you become a researcher?
I always like to solve problems, and research is a challenging problem!
Something that is really fascinating about research is you need to learn new things constantly. You might have repeated the same technique for months, but then a new project could mean that you need to use a new approach. It keeps your brain busy and it's really interesting - I love learning new techniques.
It's a job that is very flexible, but you need to be extremely committed to know what your goal is. It's not for everybody. Sometimes, the research doesn't work right and there is no straight answer. That’s a big challenge day-to-day, or even month-to-month. Then, after six or seven months you might finally see some results. This can be very frustrating, but if you have a clear goal and you know where you are going it is definitely worth it.
So how do you stay motivated when things keep not working out or you’re making slow progress?
I think it's a combination of hope, truly believing you can make a difference, and experience knowing you will get there eventually.
It also helps that you are not only doing one thing. If one test isn’t working, then you will have six or seven others going on for the same project. So, there is always at least one aspect that is working. This really helps give you some satisfaction.
Then, at the end of your project, you can really see, ‘Oh wow, after six years I have achieved this! And I got all these results!’ After years of working on a project, the full picture emerges when everything finally comes together at the end.
Your speciality is medulloblastoma, which only 75 children are diagnosed with per year. What made you decide to work on this cancer, out of all of the more common diseases you could have gone for?
When I worked in Leicester, I worked on cell development and, by chance, the gene that I worked on was really common in medulloblastoma. I was looking for a disease where I believed I could make an impact, so it made sense for me to start working on this cancer.
I also really wanted to work in a paediatric disease because I have a child. Working on rare diseases is really close to my heart too because I know how slow the progress is for these patients. Sometimes, they call rare diseases ‘orphan diseases’ because there are so few people working on them.
When you think about what would happen if your child had one of these rare cancers, you can see how frustrating it is. No one is working on them and no changes are happening - it's really painful for families.
For children with brain tumours, where you live in the world can decide whether you have a better chance of survival or a good quality of life. For example, before proton beam therapy started in the UK, a patient needed to travel to the US to get this treatment. Imagine what happens if you live in a country without access to potentially life-saving treatment. I think this is unfair.
That’s why I think much more research needs to be done in medulloblastoma; to understand more and to look for a new treatment that is globally available for these young children.
Is it more difficult researching a rare cancer?
Oh, yes - for many reasons. For example, there are not as many medulloblastoma cells available to grow in the lab and not many cancer samples for research. There is also less funding which is frustrating.
Many years ago, the UK government decided to dedicate lots of funding to help improve breast cancer, which made a big difference to survival rates. We really need support like this because we know that if there was more money and more research in these rare brain tumours, there would be an improvement in survival.
Can you tell me about the research project you’re currently working on?
We are working on a project funded by The Little Princess Trust and CCLG. We started nearly a year ago, with just myself and one PhD student. We are trying to discover a new treatment for the most aggressive medulloblastoma subgroup, which often spreads to other parts of the body.
Our work is currently focused on understanding whether a combination of medicines could better treat medulloblastoma. The cancer cells need a lot of cholesterol to survive, therefore we’re looking at an approved medicine for adults called ‘simvastatin’, which stops the body from producing too much cholesterol. We want to understand if a combination of simvastatin and normal chemotherapy or radiotherapy has an effect on medulloblastoma cells. We think that the combination could be a good treatment option to improve survival, and also reduce the toxicity of the anti-cancer drugs.
This project is funded for three years, and we are very excited with our data so far - we are sure that the results are very positive.
We’ve almost finished the first year of the project and it’s really exciting because we think that this treatment is absolutely beneficial and will have an impact.
We are working on the most aggressive subgroup of brain tumours and we hope that the drug combination could move to the clinical setting very fast, because simvastatin has been available for use in adults for 24 years and doesn’t have significant side effects.
How long did it take you to develop the idea to ‘starve’ the medulloblastoma cells of cholesterols?
In my last six years before I started to work as a lecturer, I was looking for metabolic pathways that make cancer grow faster. I looked at how our diet influences cancer growth - there is a lot of research on this topic. For example, in adults, we know that obesity helps some tumours, like meningioma, to develop. This made me ask ‘then what?’
Maybe then what we eat can influence how fast brain tumours grow. Maybe if we change our diet or we change the fuel that we give to the tumour cell, we can slow down the cancer’s growth and allow the chemotherapy or the radiotherapy to work faster and more efficiently.
What are you hoping to achieve?
We both hope to develop a new and more effective treatment that is accessible for everyone and is less aggressive, so it improves the quality of life of the patient.
We’re lucky to live in a country that helps people with rare diseases. In other countries, there’s more of a cost-benefit analysis and if you have a rare disease, the country might not pay for treatments. But in the UK, when there’s a disease in children, there is money available to make an impact.
I think if we all work together and we have good ideas, we really can make a difference for children with rare cancers, for example, such as CAR-T cell therapy, which is now available for free to treat childhood brain tumours and is really starting to work. It would be extremely expensive without the NHS, but you cannot put a price on saving the life of a child. I think we are very lucky, and I am extremely proud of the country we live in.
I’m guessing it’s very varied, but what does a ‘normal’ day in the lab look like?
We work with medulloblastoma cells, which originally come from patients. Every day, we give the cells different treatments and we grow them in different conditions to try to mimic how they would grow in the brain. Then we see if the treatment we used slowed the growth of the cancer cells.
Some of the cells are grown flat, like in a petri dish, and some are grown in tumour-like balls. This lets us see if they grow more or they are dying faster for all the different experimental treatments. That’s how we know whether a treatment might work.
What is the hardest part of being a researcher?
I think, the hardest thing is when your experiments aren’t working or are not what you are expected. It can be very frustrating.
For this project, the metabolism is the most difficult bit. Our metabolisms are so complex and varied, so we have to try to confirm our results in as many different cell lines as possible. This can take a lot of time and is very repetitive, but you want to be sure that the treatment doesn’t only work on one group of medulloblastoma cells.
It's not a simple answer when things aren’t working - it's not like the computer isn’t working, and you can turn it off and on again. It can be so many things and it's difficult and time consuming to find what went wrong.
I imagine that's a bit of a puzzle to go back and try and figure out, out of every possible way it could have gone wrong, which is the problem!
Definitely – it could be the technique, could be the temperature, could be that the cell line has mutated. Until you figure it out you might be stuck.
What will it mean for young cancer patients if your project goes as planned?
I really hope this treatment and the drug we are studying will improve quality of life and make treatment more effective, especially for children with the most aggressive types of medulloblastoma.
We want the drug combination to improve treatment for patients, reduce the side effects and be more efficient so we can avoid the tumour spreading or coming back.
One of the big problems when you have reoccurrence or spread is that there isn’t any second line of treatment. If we are able to treat these aggressive tumours with our combination treatment, we hope this means the tumour does not come back again so the child will have a better chance of survival.
How would you feel if this project does lead to a new treatment?
Oh, we'll be extremely happy – it would be amazing!
It's a lot of work day to day - sometimes you need to come in during the weekends, or you need to deliver medicines every single day from Monday to Monday. So when something works, you really feel that you achieved something extremely positive, and the many hours of working are worth it because you really believe that this could be an improvement for children with medulloblastoma.
You are clearly very passionate about your research and its purpose. What makes you love your job?
I love it because I think we can achieve change. I also really like that I work with brain tumours and my work is helping children.
I believe that every bit of our work will help to make a difference - maybe not today, not tomorrow, but in a couple of years it could be part of a big improvement for patients.
This is partly based on hope, but also on the knowledge that there really are a lot of research discoveries happening. Some are fortune, because you were lucky and you discovered something, but most are because there were many years of people working just because they believe there will be something there.
Is there anything else you think the readers should know?
I really hope that they don't think it's simple, like a cooking recipe - there is not a book that will tell you to mix A and B and it will work.
Sometimes you are extremely lucky, and things work quickly, but believe me, the majority of the days, things don’t work. When you write your report and say what you have achieved, it's difficult for people to understand the work that went into it, like how many things didn’t work or what had to be tested more. They want to know why the treatment isn’t available now, or why we haven’t found all of the answers yet.
I want to reassure them that we are working very hard every day.
Sometimes, changes take more than five years of work until patients can see benefits. It might feel slow when there are no new treatments for patients, but it means that we can be absolutely sure that our work won’t produce more harm than good for patients.
Thank you, Maria, for your time in talking to me today. Good luck with your project!
Ellie Wilkinson is CCLG’s Research Communication Executive.
She is using her lifelong fascination with science to share the world of childhood cancer research with CCLG’s fantastic supporters.
You can find Ellie on Twitter: @EllieW_CCLG