Focusing on ultrasound research at Virginia Tech

This project is focusing on diffuse midline glioma or diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, which is a glioma or brain cancer that is primarily affecting children. It's very challenging in children because they can't get the types of aggressive therapies that adults can get because their brains are still developing. There's been a lot of exciting developments on taking some of the focused ultrasound advancements, particularly for enhancing drug delivery and moving that into pediatric patients. Our goal is to use focused ultrasound with doctor Lesvovic who can actually specifically open the barriers in the brain with blood brain barrier so that we can get drugs to these tumors at high enough doses, but not necessarily affect the surrounding tissues and in keep all that neurodevelopment intact. We'll be using tissue engineered models of disease in my group. We'll be using the focus ultrasound, I'm in doctor LosevvcGroup, and then we'll also be working with Children's National, as well as Columbia University to get the relevant clinical information and perform studies in pre clinical models of the disease. The way we use focus ultrasound to help dogs and cats with cancer is to use the technology to be able to kill the cancer cells as you see, as you can see the tumor, and when we do that, we can spare patients from needing surgical removal of their tumor. We hope to be able to induce an anti tumor immune response when we use the focus ultrasound techniques to uplate these tumors, and thereby stimulating the body's own immune response to be able to fight the cancer. What it should look like is before treatment, you have tumor cells in a tumor like setting, with the same matrix they have healthy cells around, and we apply our drug in combination with focus ultrasound, and you have that same situation with no healthy tumor cells, all the tumor cells die. But our other cells in that population, your neuron gerastrocytes, are remaining healthy after treatment. That's really what we want to see is that ability to selectively destroy the cancer cells without any toxicity. The way we've structured this with such a great interdisciplinary team at Columbia Children's, and our team here at Virginia Tech allows us to do the type of science that can hopefully quickly make an impact in the clinic.