Project Funding Details

Brain cancer is the most common cancer in children. While treatments with chemotherapy and radiation can be effective initially, brain tumors often come back and are resistant to further treatment. To understand what happens at the cellular level between initial diagnosis and cancer recurrence, we will study these cells at both timepoints. While past research has focused primarily on cancer cells, we will also study the non-cancerous cells that inhabit brain tumors that may be contributing ingredients that cancer cells need to grow. By comparing cancerous and non-cancerous cells before and after treatment, we expect to find specific relationships between these cells that allow tumors to regrow after surgery and radiation. By sharing these data with the scientific community through the Single-cell Pediatric Cancer Atlas, we will have greater power to understand cancer/non-cancer cell relationships, compare these to normal relationships between healthy brain cells, and to nominate treatments that can treat or even prevent the return of cancer after initial treatment.