Developing a ‘biodegradable paste’ to deliver chemotherapy directly to the brain to treat childhood brain tumours

Childhood brain cancers which occur in the back of the head (hind brain) are difficult to treat safely. The use of radiotherapy as a treatment can result in harmful consequences such as speech loss and learning delays. In addition, chemotherapy delivered through the blood, can also result in damage to healthy parts of the body. Therefore, the development of innovative treatment options which are safer for these patients and result in fewer side-effects are urgently needed.

Many drugs which could kill cancer cells do not get inside the brain. This is because of a protective barrier (the blood-brain barrier) surrounding the brain which stops drugs entering. Dr Ruman’s pioneering research is developing a biodegradable paste which bypasses this barrier, enabling the delivery of chemotherapy drugs to treat children with brain tumours immediately after their surgery. The paste is applied to the space created after surgical removal of most of the cancer and releases drugs targeting the remaining cancer cells which surgery cannot remove safely.

Dr Ruman’s laboratory project will assess the most effective use of this biodegradable paste as an innovative drug-delivery model for treating children with brain tumours. The research team will first test chemotherapy drugs which are known to be effective for these types of cancer, but which cannot cross the barrier surrounding the brain for their ability to treat brain tumours. They will also develop models of childhood brain cancer cells grown in 3D on special dishes, and study how cancer cells ‘talk’ to health brain cells (which mimics what occurs after surgery in patients) to identify key cancer genes which are switched on. Using this 3D model they will test 80 anti-cancer drugs to identify which can stop the relevant cancer genes from working properly. This will help them to better understand which drugs are most likely to be effective therapies to target the cancer cells. Through this innovative project, it is hoped that this novel approach to delivering chemotherapy drugs will result in increased survival of children with brain tumours with fewer resulting side-effects caused by their treatment.