In August 2019, The Cure Starts Now hosted the DIPG|DMG Symposium In Sydney, Australia. In addition to hearing the latest results from researchers around the globe, we also had the chance to honor some of our long-time collaborators. Dr. Chris Jones was presented with the much overdue "DIPG Researcher of the Year" award for both his work and leadership in the DIPG Community. We were able to sit down with Dr. Jones to discuss his views on the importance of collaboration. 

The DIPG|DMG Symposium

Bringing together these kind of researchers and families at this sort of meeting – this is really probably my favorite meeting that I go to. It's really inspiring to see all the other researchers and clinicians; hearing about what they're doing; look for obvious areas that we could work together; but also being in the same room as the families, and the foundations – hearing their stories.

The Value of the DIPG Registry

It was just a fantastic initiative to pull together such a huge resource of clinical data, and then eventually genomic data, and ... models derived from those samples worldwide. Linking together the international registry and the European registry really represents a unique resource to tap into to really understand this terrible disease better.

The Importance of Collaboration

We do a lot of different things in my lab through the cell-based assays, and the mouse modeling as well. A lot of what we do is the genomics. And that involves pulling together data from around the world – from generating our own data in-house with the samples that are sent to us. Now we work alongside clinical trial cohorts as well so we try to do rapid turnaround of those genomic profiles.

"Nothing we do could exist in isolation. Every piece or work that we are involved in with DIPG involves collaboration in some way or another."

A lot of what we've done has been to pull this together from around the world. So that relies on the good grace of researchers worldwide to share their data to make it publicly available. And then we have really talented bioinformaticians who try to put this together from different sources, different platforms so they can really get the fullest possible picture of DIPG.

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