Understanding how childhood medulloblastoma begins to identify new treatments

The challenge

Medulloblastoma is a type of cancer that grows in a part of the brain that controls balance and movement. Standard treatments - like surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy - have improved survival but often impact children’s long-term health and quality of life. Some children’s medulloblastomas are more aggressive and are even harder to treat. 

There is an urgent need for better treatments, but scientists don’t know enough about how medulloblastoma develops to effectively find and test new treatments. At the moment, most researchers use mouse models or tumour cells grown in artificial laboratory conditions, which do not accurately reflect how brain tumours develop and behave in a child’s brain. As a result, progress in finding safer and more effective treatments has been slow. 
 

The project

To boost progress into new treatments, Dr Sarah Badodi’s project at Queen Mary University of London will develop 3D ‘mini-brain’ models. These are groups of cells, grown together in the lab, that mimic early human brain development and contain the types of cells that can form medulloblastoma. The team will switch specific genes on and off in these models to investigate how healthy brain cells are transformed into cancer cells.

Her team hope that this will answer three main questions: 

1. What are the first changes inside cells that trigger the most aggressive form of medulloblastoma?
2. Which genes are responsible for these early changes, and how do they turn healthy cells into cancer cells?
3. How do these early changes affect brain cells in the mini-brain models that more accurately show how the human brain develops?
    

The impact

By understanding how normal brain cells are transformed into cancer, this research will help explain why and how medulloblastoma develops. This knowledge could reveal new ways to target the cancer, supporting the development of more precise and less harmful treatments and improving the long-term quality of life of children affected by medulloblastoma.