There is a lot of interest in the potential of Cannibidiol (CBD) as a therapy for brain tumours. Brain Tumour Action, The Astro Brain Tumour Fund, and fundraising led by Mr Steve Frost have jointly funded research exploring how paediatric brain tumour cells react with CBD.

We have been studying the impact of different concentrations of CBD on 3D tumour cell models and also in conditions without oxygen (as this best mimics the conditions of the tumour in the brain). The research has focussed on ependymoma and paediatric high grade glioma cells. We have found that the cells do die, but there appears to be a cascade of events which lead to the cell death after a single CBD dose and we need to find out more about this.

Some patients currently take cannabis oil as adjuvant therapy for a brain tumour. We plan to replicate how they do this (e.g. 3 days on, 3 days off) in the laboratory, so we can understand its impact on the tumour cells.

Future work in this area may see us strengthen work with other researchers, including those at the University of Western Australia, to explore the effects of CBD on immune reactions.

Finally, we intend to combine our CBD work with our previous study into the Ketogenic diet, to see if the two therapies interact with each other by looking at cells cultured in the absence of glucose and dosed with CBD. It would also be interesting to see if there is any increase in cell death if the cells are exposed to radiotherapy, as radiotherapy causes cellular damage which may enable more damage to be caused to the cell by the ketogenic diet or CBD or both.

Medulloblastoma is the most common aggressive brain tumour of childhood and accounts for a quarter of all brain tumours. Many medulloblastomas are metastatic at diagnosis i.e. cancer cells have already spread away from the original tumour. Spread of cancer cells or, even worse, evidence of additional tumours growing away from the original site, makes it less likely that current therapies will be successful. The majority of these patients will die despite intensive treatment.

Dr Beth Coyle and her team are developing develop new model systems that mimic human tumour behaviour in order to investigate what causes tumour spread. Their research focusses on discovering more about medulloblastoma cells, and how they behave. Knowing more about how their behaviour and how this can be identified, could lead to further studies by the scientific community to develop new treatments, and therapies.

Current projects include testing novel drugs which could inhibit medulloblastoma cells from migrating, and identifying markers of metastasis in Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) using imaging machines.  The group have also found that medulloblastoma tumours manipulate their microenvironment to support specific patterns of migration. Further work is being conducted to understand the underlying mechanisms.

We are anticipating a number of published papers on our work in 2019/20, including in Neuro Oncology, BMC Biology and the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Imaging. 

We now have 100 patients that have consented to be part of the research study, Biomeca, which is part of the SIOP Ependymoma II Clinical Trial (see Molecular Neuro-Oncology Page). 

We are in discussion with the NHS about setting up a national Multi Disciplinary Team meeting for all paediatric brain tumours (similar to the Ependymoma Management Advisory Team, which CBTRC leads). Were this to be established, this will ensure the Clinicians are provided with support for complex cases, and alongside this, it would advocate for and encourage best practice in sample collection. This would mean scientists will have the opportunity to have the best access to samples from which they can find new diagnostic methods, treatments and cures for childhood brain cancers.