Breakthrough in treatment of children with brain tumors

Peter Carmeliet and his research team of the University of Louvain and the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology VIV and their Harvard colleagues, have made a breakthrough in the treatment of medulloblastoma, the most common brain tumor among children. Together with scientists from the Massachusetts General Hospital in Harvard, Carmeliet found that the growth and spread of a tumor could be slowed down by suppressing the placenta growth factor P1GF. This is a very positive step towards a new therapy for children suffering from this brain tumor, as it could translate as a better and much more viable option with less damaging and long-term side-effects than the current treatments, which involve the surgical removal of the tumor or a part thereof, followed by radio- and chemotherapy. The protein P1GF plays a key role in the growth of blood vessels in a tumor. The protein causes the blood vessels to grow towards the tumor cells to supply oxygen and nutrients. When Carmeliet and his team researched the role of P1GF in various types of medulloblastomas in mice, they found that the protein was essential for the survival of these tumors and that it was also directly responsible for stimulating the growth of the cancer cells. Blocking the protein may therefore be quite efficient from a therapeutic point of view. When P1GF was blocked with an antibody in mice with a tumor, it slowed down its growth, reduced its spreading to the spinal column and increased life expectancy. The therapeutic value of this approach among humans will now be examined more extensively, but considering the fact that the protein plays a role in the stimulation of the forming of blood vessels in tumors, suppressing it could well have less damaging side-effects than current treatments, the researchers believe.