Low Grade Glioma Program

Personalized Approach

We understand that your child is unique and special to you in many ways, and we will create a treatment plan to fit their needs. In fact, we understand how unique each child is in the literal physical sense, down to the molecular level. Not only do we provide personalized care, we also provide personalized medicine from a treatment standpoint.

Cutting Edge Research

Our research is looking at how to treat low grade glioma at a molecular level, finding the specific genetic problem (mutation) that is causing the cancer and then finding a drug that will target that specific mutation. This means that a drug that may work for another child’s case of low-grade glioma, may not work for your child because low grade gliomas can be caused by a variety of genetic mutations. 

Fortunately low grade gliomas are relatively simple and do not form multiple mutations, thus the outlook to developing targeted, personalized medicine drugs is positive. We have clinical trials in progress to find out if targeted medicines will work on low grade gliomas. Results take a couple of years to confirm the effectiveness of a drug, since the goal is for patients to be cured. Learn more about the clinical trials at Dana-Farber / Children’s Hospital Cancer Center and how your child could benefit and maybe help find a new cure.

Partnerships

Just as our care is multidisciplinary, we also take a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to research, teaming up with some of the brightest minds in science. Children’s Hospital Boston and Dana-Farber have teamed up with the Broad Research Institute, which is a joint research initiative between the bio-engineering experts of MIT and the medical experts of Harvard to look at the cellular causes of cancers, including low grade gliomas. Additionally, we are the only center in New England that is part of the Pediatric Oncology Experimental Therapeutics Investigators Consortium (POETIC).

Innovations

One of our unique innovations is the use of MRI during surgery, or an intraoperative MRI. This allows our neurosurgeons to obtain detailed images during surgery to help track their progress during surgery and make sure they remove all the cancer they can.