New Ependymoma Research Effort Included in NBTS Flagship Research Project, DNA Damage Response (DDR) Consortium
National Brain Tumor Society’s
DNA Damage Response (DDR) Consortium is a collaboration of world-class researchers advancing an emerging and promising, but underdeveloped, area of cancer research: a tumor’s DDR network. We are pleased to announce that a new ependymoma research effort at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital will be among the consortium’s projects.
The consortium has the ability to cultivate this budding area of research and propel an entirely new class of treatments forward for both adults and children with multiple different types of malignant brain tumors, including ependymoma.
The consortium will test different drugs in the laboratory, share data, and then bring the most promising drugs forward to evaluate in clinical trials that match the right drugs with the right patients. The consortium is made up of a diverse team of world-class researchers from across the United States with unparalleled expertise and the experience needed to rapidly develop and advance these drugs.
Recently, the National Brain Tumor Society
announced exciting new additions to the DNA Damage Response Consortium. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is one of the four new world class hospitals joining the consortium. The ependymoma research component of the DDR Consortium is supported by the CERN Foundation, a program of the National Brain Tumor Society, and will incorporate drug testing in ependymoma models to see if drugs called DNA Damage Response inhibitors would help identify new therapeutic targets. Leveraging the efforts of the larger DDR Consortium by incorporating an ependymoma component is a strategic effort to leverage the resources of a large and expert consortium, with expertise in advanced scientific methods, to better serve a rare brain tumor population like ependymoma.
