Research

Empowering Brain Cancer Research Through Tissue Donation

Pediatric brain cancer research is not proceeding as fast as it could and survival rates have flatlined because tissue for research is scarce.

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The Power of Tissue Donation

Autopsy Tissue

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Empowered Research

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Medical Advances

The precious gift of your child’s autopsy tissue will empower research so breakthroughs can be made and a cure can be found for this devastating disease. Here you will find a listing of some pediatric cancer publications that 1) explain the need for autopsy tissue and 2) highlight some of the research breakthroughs that have been made possible because of autopsy tissue.

Recent Publications from Centers of Excellence

Dr. Monje-Deisseroth and her team at Stanford University recently published a paper detailing how gliomas are able to “hijack” the brain’s communication system.

Published in Nature: High-grade gliomas are lethal brain cancers whose progression is robustly regulated by neuronal activity. Activity-regulated release of growth factors promotes glioma growth, but this alone is insufficient to explain the effect that neuronal activity exerts on glioma progression. Here we show that neuron and glioma interactions include electrochemical communication through bona fide AMPA receptor-dependent neuron–glioma synapses. Read More

Congratulations to two of our Center of Excellence teams lead by Dr Javad Nazarian and Dr. Michelle Monje on their recent groundbreaking research publication. Due in part to increased access to post-mortem tissuethe teams were able to study a larger sample of DIPG tumors. Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma is a lethal pediatric brain cancer characterized by H3K27M histone mutation. Nagaraja et al. characterize a large cohort of rare primary tumors and normal pontine tissue to reveal active regulatory element heterogeneity dependent upon the histone variant and cell context in which the mutation occurs. Read More