Mount Sinai Launches Children’s Brain and Spinal Tumor Center

To accelerate the development of more effective treatments for children with brain and spinal tumors, Mount Sinai has launched the Children’s Brain and Spinal Tumor Center. The center is led by Oren Becher, MD, Chief of the Jack Martin Fund Division of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology; Saadi Ghatan, MD, Chair of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai West and Mount Sinai Morningside, and Director of the Health System's Pediatric Neurosurgery Program; and Praveen Raju, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Neurology, and Neuroscience, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Approximately 4,500 children are diagnosed with a brain or spinal tumor annually in the United States, with half of the cases deemed aggressive or malignant. Although advances in clinical care have resulted in five-year survival rates of nearly 70-80 percent, many survivors who receive therapy, including systemic chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy, are left with significant morbidities. These include lower I.Q. scores, endocrine and growth deficiencies, and a risk of secondary malignancies. Furthermore, there are some pediatric brain tumors, such as diffuse midline glioma and diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), where the median survival is approximately 11 months from diagnosis, with less than 1 percent of children surviving beyond five years from diagnosis.

The Children’s Brain and Spinal Tumor Center will focus on innovative translational research, bridging basic science with the clinical care of children with brain and spinal tumors. An exciting example of this is the development of novel strategies to bypass the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Dr. Raju has advanced a novel fucoidan-based nanomedicine platform that allows reformulation of several classes of anti-cancer drugs that can penetrate through a tight BBB specifically at the site of the brain tumor via an active transport mechanism that requires caveolin-1-mediated transcytosis. This work was published in Nature Materials.

To expand our capacity to launch innovative clinical trials, the Center has recently recruited two leading pediatric neuro-oncologists: Stephen Gilheeney, MD, an expert in the treatment of children with brain and spinal tumors who will serve as the clinical lead for the development of novel clinical trials, and Kincheon Bryan Li, MD, who will work to advance our understanding of DIPG as well as evaluate novel treatment strategies. Research at the Center is currently supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as foundations that fund childhood cancer research. To learn more about the Center, please visit https://icahn.mssm.edu/research/cbstc.