“The CSN funding has been pivotal in establishing our DIPG Research Program at the Children’s Cancer Institute. This is the first established laboratory in Australia with a program specifically focused on developing novel treatments for DIPG. Each grant received has allowed the program to explore diverse therapeutic approaches and generate preliminary data to attract additional funding from larger national grant schemes. More importantly it has led to one of our recent discoveries (CBL0137)—shown to have promising therapeutic efficacy in DIPG preclinical models — to be developed as a COG Phase 1 trial.

We should expect a plethora of new therapeutic approaches to be introduced and trialed over the next five years. These include biotherapeutics, antibodies, immunotherapies, sequential drug treatments, as well as new methods to overcome the blood-brain-barrier. I would like to thank the donors and those involved in securing funding for our lab and other teams globally.

Without funding we would not be able to develop pre-clinical models of DIPG, examine the therapeutic efficacy of drugs and understand the biology of this tumour.”