CAC2 Childhood Cancer Community News Digest (January 24-30)

Assorted news from last week:

Retinoblastoma treatment outcomes have improved globally over the past four decades but large disparities persist between higher-income and lower-income countries, with some areas having major survival gaps. Targeted health-care policy making with increased health-care financing and accessibility are needed in low-income and lower-middle-income countries to improve retinoblastoma outcomes worldwide.

Scientists at the Princess Máxima Center compared the effectiveness of RNA sequencing with traditional methods that allow you to specifically search the DNA and RNA for known gene changes. Using RNA sequencing, the team picked out 40% more than they found using traditional techniques.

Wiley online in CANCER, a peer reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic had a profound effect on paediatric care causing significant staff changes resulting in physical, psychological and financial distress.

New research suggests that chemotherapy could better target brain tumors in mouse models when it was administered at night instead of during the day. That’s because the blood-brain barrier was more likely to allow the chemotherapy to pass through it at night.

Something to think about:  Research from Clinical Cancer Research, examined 13 combinations with cancer immunotherapy drugs and found that the benefits of all the pairings seem to come from each drug independently, not how they work together.

Researchers have demonstrated that a novel combination of two drugs that act as targeted inhibitors, delivered in a nanoparticle formulation, extend the survival of mice with medulloblastoma. The research team believes this laboratory success could be translated into a less toxic treatment for medulloblastoma, the most common malignant pediatric brain tumor.

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