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Children's National Receives Grant to Study Potential Treatments for Pediatric Brain Cancer, Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma

Washington, DC – Children’s National Health System’s Javad Nazarian, PhD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics Principal Investigator at Center for Genetic Medicine, Children’s National Health System, was the recent recipient of a grant from the Rally Foundation to study potential treatments of pediatric diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) in mouse models.

“Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma is an aggressive and incurable tumor in the brainstem that researchers are still trying to understand in order to determine better treatment options for children,” stated Dr. Nazarian. “With this grant we hope to study the efficacy and survivability of different therapeutic drug combinations on the tumors.”

Dr. Nazarian’s team at Children’s National will work with colleagues from the University of California, San Francisco, led by Sabine Mueller, MD, PhD, to test drug combinations in different genomic subtypes of DIPG to determine the best course of treatment for use in human clinical trials.

“We are absolutely thrilled to support Dr. Nazarian’s cutting-edge pediatric cancer research,” said Dean Crowe, Founder and CEO of Rally. “It is important to fund scientists like Dr. Nazarian as we work toward closing the childhood cancer research funding gap so that no parent ever has to hear that there is no curative option for their child.”

This grant is part of the $2 million Rally will be awarding to 22 hospitals across the country this year. Since its founding in 2005, Rally has distributed more than $9 million to more than 250 childhood cancer research projects nationwide, including basic science, fellowships, and clinical trials.

Children’s National and UCSF are part of the Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium, a network of 15 children’s hospitals that conduct clinical trials of new therapies for children with brain tumors. The consortium has generated DIPG models and identified unique DIPG genomic combinations that will be used in this research study.

Contact: Emily Hartman at 202-476-4500