Funded by the Little Princess Trust and administered by CCLG
Lead investigator: Professor Darren Hargrave, UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health
Award: £298,343.80
Awarded March 2026
The challenge
Diffuse midline gliomas (DMGs) are fast-growing cancers that grow in important parts of a child’s brain. Standard cancer treatments, like surgery and radiotherapy, can’t cure these children; they only temporarily help with symptoms. DMGs often spread to other brain areas and, despite extensive research, most children with DMG survive less than a year. There is a real need to develop new and better treatments.
Recent research has shown that DMG tumour cells can connect with healthy brain cells and tap into the brain’s electrical communication system. These abnormal electrical signals increase tumour growth and encourage the tumour to spread. These discoveries, mostly from research in mice, have changed how scientists think about brain tumours and the way they interact with the brain. However, more work is needed to understand these processes in humans, so that researchers can find ways to disrupt these signals and improve survival outcomes.
The project
Professor Darren Hargrave’s group at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health has already investigated DMG’s connections with the healthy brain, providing the first evidence in children that healthy brain connections can help tumours grow faster and may reduce survival time. Their clinical data suggests these connections might be safely disrupted during carefully planned surgery. This would weaken the tumour, disconnecting it from the electrical activity it uses to grow.
In this project, his team wants to build on this work to create a three-dimensional map of exactly how DMG tumour cells interact with the brain. They will test whether the tumour’s electrical signals can be safely monitored in real time during surgery and combine the results with a detailed analysis of donated tumour samples. They hope to identify which connections are important for DMG growth, in the hopes of eventually identifying ways to target these connections and improve survival.
The impact
If the researchers are able to identify tumour-to-brain connections in DMG that can be targeted by drugs or surgery, they hope to gather evidence for a ground-breaking DMG clinical trial. It would mean a shift from toxic chemotherapies that damage children’s developing bodies, often without hope for a cure in DMG, to a new targeted route of treatment that may also help children with other types of childhood brain tumour.