Brain Tumour Research

The Brain Tumour Research Laboratory was established in 2011, bringing together the clinic and the laboratory to advance research into childhood brain tumours.

The team is a collaborative group of researchers dedicated to improving our understanding of paediatric brain tumour biology and finding more effective treatments to improve survival rates and quality of life for patients.

The skills of our team members are diverse and include laboratory scientists from academia and industry, clinical oncologists and neuro-surgeons.

Each member of the team brings their unique and varied experience to tackle our research questions. Researchers perform basic and pre-clinical research aimed at identifying the best targets for new therapies and effective new treatments for clinical trials.

Moreover, we collaborate with others who bring valuable expertise. These include, but are not limited to, radiologists (clinical and mouse models), medical physicists (cell and animal imaging), chemists (drug screening), pharmacologists (pre-clinical testing in mouse models) and bioinformaticians (large scale analyses of brain tumour genomics).

The team has established a strong national and international reputation and is recognised as being the largest research team in Australia primarily focused on paediatric brain tumours. The major goals of the group are intensely focused on improving the wellbeing of children with cancer.

With strong ties between Telethon Kids and Princess Margaret Hospital, the team knows what it takes to get a new treatment into the clinic and their research goals are sharply focused on providing the pre-clinical evidence required to form the basis of new clinical trials.

The overarching scientific goals of our team approach to improving outcomes for children with brain tumours are:

• Elucidate the molecular basis of different brain tumour types, including medulloblastoma and ependymoma among others, through the analysis of primary patient specimens
• Improve understanding of the molecular events contributing to these diseases, by analysing the impact of altered signalling pathway activity on the survival, proliferation, invasiveness and tumorigenicity of brain tumour cells
• Develop novel preclinical models of paediatric brain tumours by relevant targeted genetic mutations in mice to provide systems in which to test new treatments
• Obtain and test new therapies in appropriate brain tumour models through collaboration with members of the Telethon Kids Cancer Centre, other academic partners, and industry groups
• Translate our findings into improved therapies and design of new clinical trials, which we achieve through national and international collaborations with clinical trials consortia such as Australian Children’s Cancer Trials (ACCT) and the Children’s Oncology Group (COG).