September 1, 2024—The Credit Unions Kids at Heart® (CU Kids at Heart) C.J. Buckley Memorial Fund for Pediatric Brain Cancer Research supports the work of a research lab at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center that has developed a new, powerful approach for the treatment of cancer. After years of study aimed at answering foundational questions about the biological origins and recurrence of cancers, the lab has identified a relationship between cancer growth and inflammation.
Conventional cancer therapies, the lab found, are a double edge sword which do not always improve the benefit to risk ratio for the patient. It is widely known, for example, that one of the common side effects of immunotherapy, a biological therapy considered effective for some cancers that uses the body’s own immune system to find and destroy cancer cells, is inflammation. While inflammation is part the body’s natural response to infection or tissue damage, it can also contribute to the development of cellular mutations and progression of cancerous cells. Similarly, chemotherapy and radiation can result in cellular debris which can trigger new growth.
In the past year, the lab has demonstrated that the resolution of inflammation can dramatically impact the efficacy of traditional cancer treatments. Their investigators have found beneficial agents, called resolvins and protectins, that not only block the molecules that promote inflammation, but also stimulate other molecules that destroy cellular waste. These lipid treatments are in clinical development now for a variety of conditions and are believed to have tremendous potential in the treatment of pediatric brain tumors, a research priority for CU Kids at Heart.
The lab has published in prestigious journals including the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences and presented six papers at a meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research, the largest cancer research organization in the world, in April 2024. The lab presented their findings and announced that these agents will enter clinical trials in patients in 2025. If they are found to be safe and free of dangerous side effects, the FDA may expedite approval these drugs to facilitate their getting to patients sooner.
The C.J. Buckley Memorial Fund for Pediatric Brain Cancer Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center honors a young man who lost a 16-month battle with brain cancer in 2002. To learn more about the C.J. Buckley Memorial Fund or the research it supports, or to learn about CU Kids at Heart-funded research at Boston Children’s Hospital, please visit www.cukidsatheart.org.