Dr. David Ziegler, Associate Professor at the Children’s Cancer Institute and at Sydney Children’s Hospital

“The DIPG|DMG Symposium has been absolutely incredible collaborative affair bringing together the best and the brightest researchers and doctors and scientists from around the world. Together with parents and fundraisers and stakeholders to put all our minds together to come up with new ideas to look at what’s been achieved in the last couple of years, to work out what’s been done in the lab that can be brought to the clinic to help children and where we should be going in the future.

It feels like we’re at a real turning point, that there’s been this incredible investment in research. We’re making new in-roads and new discoveries and new insights that we didn’t have before.

What I found is that some of the avenues that we’ve gone down are different to what’s been happening in other parts of the world and we’ve been able to bring these ideas to the table and actually show people different ways of thinking about this disease.

Funding Innovative Research

We have come up with ideas, sometimes they’ve been out of the box. When you’ve never done something before it’s very hard to get government funding for that because they want to see the results first before they will give you that support. So, The Cure Starts Now has really allowed us to come up with these ideas and say, “we will help you make these ideas into a reality”. I absolutely believe that we are going to get to the point where we find a cure for this disease. It feels like we are at the turning point. We’re making new discoveries, we have the best and the brightest people working on this and I really believe it can be done.”