Funded by The Little Princess Trust and administered by CCLG
Lead investigator: Dr Antonios Pouliopoulos, King's College London
Award: £850,658.89
Awarded July 2022
There is currently no effective treatment for diffuse midline glioma, a very difficult to treat childhood brain tumour. A treatment that increases survival rate and improves the patient’s quality of life is still missing.
This is mainly because of the blood-brain barrier. This barrier protects our brains from pathogens in the blood, but also blocks most medicines from entering the brain. Whilst other brain tumours can break this barrier, diffuse midline glioma has an intact barrier. This means that nearly all medications can’t get into the brain, so only a tiny percentage of any drugs given can reach the tumour cells.
In order to get any treatment to the tumour, doctors are forced to increase the dose considerably. This can lead to serious side effects that have a devastating impact on the patient and the caregivers.
Dr Antonios Pouliopoulos and his team at King's College London aim to pack combinations of strong medicines into tiny particles, called liposomes. The researchers will design the particles to react to heat so that, when heated up, they will melt and release the medicines.
To get the liposomes to the tumour so that they can release their medicines, the researchers will use a type of ultrasound. They will combine the ultrasound with another type of special particle which can temporarily open the blood-brain barrier, allowing the liposomes to enter the brain. At this point, the research team will be able to adjust the settings to heat up the are to be treated so that the liposomes release their medicines in a specific place. Dr Antonios Pouliopoulos hopes that this new method can treat the tumour without exposing the rest of the body to chemotherapy drugs.