Dr. Michelle Monje, Pediatric Neuro-oncologist, Stanford University School of Medicine

“When I first came to the DIPG field after taking care of a child with DIPG in medical school I realized that I needed to work on this scientifically and take care of these children in the clinic. At that time we knew absolutely nothing about the disease. We didn’t have any experimental model systems to study it, we didn’t know what mutations were driving it, we didn’t have any idea what potential therapeutic targets might be and we had no tools to answer that fundamental question."

Over the last five years I think we’ve made more progress as a field than we had in the previous fifty.

“It’s just been incredibly exciting to be part of, what I think has been an exponential increase in our knowledge about this disease that I really hope in the next five years are going to result in some effective therapies for this terrible cancer.”

About Support for DIPG Research

“The Cure Starts Now has supported my research program since the first day that I opened my lab. It’s been enormously important in helping us to develop new tools in order to ask high-risk, high-reward questions and really to get the program launched.”

About Continued Progress and Collaboration

“Collaboration is really critical to progress and I think that in general, I think that all progress in DIPG and in science depends upon exchange of ideas, working together, sharing resources, and one of the wonderful things about the DIPG research community is that it is so collaborative. I think everyone who studies this disease and certainly everyone who takes care of children affected by DIPG really has their eye on the ultimate goal of helping children who are suffering with this cancer and everything else falls away and so this is an enormously collaborative community.”