Funded by The Little Princess Trust and administered by CCLG
Lead investigator: Dr Ruman Rahman, University of Nottingham
Award: £196,492.08
Awarded July 2022
Little is known about what fuels the growth of brain cancers in children. Ependymoma is one of these cancers and has very poor survival rates. After surgery, followed by chemotherapy or radiotherapy, most of the cancer cells are killed. However, the cancer returns in half of the children. This time the medicines don’t work and sadly, only a few children live for longer than five years.
Brain cancer cells need energy in order to multiply and to receive signals from the surrounding brain cells. Cancer cells use this energy for their unregulated growth and survival. This is called ‘metabolism’ and it can stop medicines from working. This process also produces ‘metabolites’ – small substances that can be detected by scientists.
To better understand ependymoma metabolism, Dr Ruman Rahman and his team at the University of Nottingham have collected samples from different areas of cancer tumours from seven patients. They then extracted the metabolites from each sample. After their analysis, they found that some types of metabolites were found in nearly every patient’s cancer. This could mean that these metabolites are crucially important to the cancer’s survival.
Using the same cancer samples, the research team also found out which genes were active and were a part of metabolism. Stopping these genes from working could be a way to treat children with ependymoma. There are medicines that are already available that could be used for this purpose.
The researchers will now test the top four medicines to see if they can shut down the metabolism of brain cancer cells grown in the lab. They will then select the two medicines which work the best and test whether the medicines improve the chance of survival in models of ependymoma.