Projects we fund

Overview

Brain tumours are the leading cause of childhood cancer death. Many advances have been made in treating the most common childhood brain tumour, medulloblastoma, but current treatments still fail in around a third of young patients. Although less common, high-grade gliomas and diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas are even harder to treat, and other, rarer groups of tumours are also commonly fatal. The children who do survive brain tumours are often left with severe, life-limiting disabilities as a result of the tumour and the aggressive treatments necessary to save their life. So new treatments are desperately needed. The INSTINCT programme integrates research programmes at three of the UK’s leading paediatric brain tumour research centres – the Northern Institute for Cancer Research at Newcastle University, the UCL Institute of Child Health and the Institute of Cancer Research. This collaboration is helping scientists to take forward vital research into the biological causes of brain tumours, and to use this information to give children hope for new treatments.

What difference will this project make?

By combining the expertise of leading scientists and clinicians from across the three leading UK research centres, the INSTINCT programme aims to bridge the gap between biological discovery and clinical practice – how we take new findings from the lab to the hospital wards. This unified network of research and clinical excellence will enable the team to accelerate progress in the treatment of these tumours – giving them access to more data, allowing them to share their findings, and helping to get clinical trials underway more quickly with a larger number of children affected by these brain tumours. Ultimately more children with these high-risk brain tumours will survive for longer, and, more effective, less toxic treatments will give them a better quality of survival.

Q&A: Our major advances in understanding childhood brain tumours

Professor Steve Clifford has provided an overview of some of the key discoveries from the INSTINCT programme. that has received almost £1 million in funding from Children with Cancer UK so far. Read Professor Steve Clifford’s Q&A on our major advances in understanding childhood brain  tumours. Q&A: Our major advances