Insights: Personalizing Medicine for Pediatric Brain Cancer

Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in children.
The standard treatments for these diseases are surgery, whole brain and spine radiation, and intensive chemotherapy. Although these aggressive treatments can cure some patients, one in four patients dies from the disease, and those who survive often suffer devastating long-term side effects, which include intellectual disability, hormonal disorders and an increased risk of other cancers.
Safer and more effective therapies are desperately needed, and treatment advances cannot come soon enough for these vulnerable pediatric patients.
Join Sanford Burnham Prebys’ Dr. Robert Wechsler-Reya and Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego’s Dr. John Crawford to learn about the latest efforts in developing better treatments for pediatric brain cancer:
• Screening hundreds of FDA-approved drugs to find more effective and less toxic therapies that are customized to a child’s specific tumor
• Developing new drug(s) that inhibit the growth of some of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer
• Understanding how brain tumors hide from the immune system, and using immunotherapy to improve treatment
SPEAKERS
John Crawford, M.D., M.S.
Director, Neuro-Oncology Program
Rady Children’s
Professor of Clinical Neurosciences and Pediatrics
Director, Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Fellowship Program
Director, Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Clinical Research
UC San Diego
Robert Wechsler-Reya, Ph.D.
Professor and Director, Tumor Initiation and Maintenance Program
NCI-Designated Cancer Center
Sanford Burnham Prebys
Program Director, Joseph Clayes III Research Center for Neuro-Oncology and Genomics
Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine