First time in the world, a 13-year-old boy, Lucas Jemeljanova from Belgium has become the first case to be cured of a deadly brain cancer.
He was suffering from Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), which is a rare and therefore highly aggressive brain tumor that is fatal in 98 percent of the cases within five years.
He was randomly assigned to be in a clinical study where everolimus, a type of drug in chemotherapy that is used in the treatment of kidney, pancreas, breast, and brain cancers, was given to him however it is not used successfully in DIPG.
He reacted positively towards the treatment and the tumor dissipated progressively. After a seven-year battle with cancer, he no longer showed any signs of cancer and has now been in remission for five years, as Daily Mail reported.
His doctor Jacques Grill said Lucas was living proof, who’d come on ‘top of all possible odds,’ and definitely brought hope for others.
More about Lucas’s success story about beating Deadly Brain Cancer
His parents took him to France, and he became one of the first enrollees in the BIOMEDE trials, which were being conducted to determine the effectiveness of new drugs for DIPG.
In particular, everolimus blocks mTOR, a protein that prompts the growth and division of cancer cells, and also helps the cancer cells form new blood vessels.
This in return, stops or slows the growth of a cancer by the means of hindering the cancerous cells to reproduce and by reducing blood supply to the cancer cells, as Daily Mail reported.
Learn more about Everolimus drug
It is the first prescription drug sanctioned by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for various cancer treatments.
Doctors used to be reluctant to abandon the therapy; it was not until the last year and a half when it was found out that Lucas had quit the drugs on his own.
Dr. Grill said, ‘I didn’t know when to stop, or how, because there was no reference in the world,’ reported by Daily Mail.
The boys’ doctor, Dr Grill, who is the head of the brain tumor program at the Gustave Roussy Cancer Center in Paris said, ‘Over a series of MRI scans, I watched as the tumor completely disappeared.’
The reason Lucas recovered so well after being administered the treatment is yet unknown to the doctors.
More about the Trial of drug
It is just Lucas’s tumor that has totally disappeared, which is the first long-term response registered for seven other children in the clinical trial for three years after diagnosis, even though they were not harmed by cancer after the treatment.
Gene testing could be useful to personalize the treatment, and the fact that some children responded to the drugs while others did not is probably because of ‘biological particularities’ or molecular differences of their tumors, as Dr Grill said.
He said, “Lucas’s tumor had an extremely rare mutation which we believe made its cells far more sensitive to the drug,” reported Daily Mail.
Children are the target of DIPG – Experts
According to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, roughly 300 children annually are diagnosed with DIPG, therefore it is considered a pediatric brain tumor. It mostly occurs in children between five and nine years old.
This type of cancer is present at the base of the brain and the top of the cord, but the reason why they occur is not known yet.
The tumor causes compression of the pons, which is a part of the brain responsible for important bodily functions such as breathing, sleeping, and blood pressure.
Among the primary signs of this tumor are problems with eye movements, facial weakness, trouble with walking, and other crude movements while muscle resistance is usually the last to show.
While it is advanced, the tumor damages the natural mechanism of heartbeat, breathing, swallowing, eyesight, and balance.
As Daily Mail reported, among the symptoms that are the first to manifest themselves are difficulties with eye movement, facial muscle weakening, an unusual mechanism in locomotion, strange limb movements, and imbalances.
The six-year-old Lucas was diagnosed after catching a nasty virus during the school break. He could not correctly walk, get unsteady standing, couldn’t pee properly, would pass out the next moment, and had nose bleeds.
Researchers are studying peculiarities in Lucas’s tumor case
The scientists have now started working on the creation of cells similar to those that were found in Lucas’s body.
“Lucas is believed to have had a particular form of the disease,” said Lucas and added further, ‘We must understand what and why to succeed in medically reproducing in other patients what happened naturally with him,’ reported DailyMail.
Researchers are thus looking into the genetic abnormalities of patients’ tumors besides tumor formation ‘organoids’, a fake organ mass of cells, imitating normal organ structure.
The team aims to produce organoids that mimic those of Lucas. The result link will then be studied to understand whether the tumor would be destroyed like that of Lucas.
Marie-Anne Debily, a researcher supervising the lab work said, “The next step will be to find a drug that has the same effect on tumor cells as these cellular changes.”
The process is said to long time. Dr Grill said, “On average, it takes 10-15 years from the first lead to become a drug – it’s a long and drawn-out process,” Daily Mail reported.