Post-doctoral Fellowship Grant Awarded to Chan Chung

DIPG are lethal tumors and over 90% of patients die within 1.5 years of diagnosis. A major challenege in the lack of effective treatments is because therapies that work in adults or other types of childhood cancers either produce no effect or only marginally improve survival for DIPG patients. There is an urgent and unmet need to develop effective therapies for children with DIPG. Cancer cells exhibit aberrant and accelerated metabolism that can be leveraged to kill tumor cells. We have discovered that the frequently-found histone H3K27M mutation (~80%) in DIPGs alters how DIPG cells metabolize nutrients. We aim to target this metabolic pathway as a potential therapy that simultaneously tackles two dysfunctional pathways in DIPGs, thus improving chances of therapeutic success by overcoming the ability of cancer cells to resist treatment via redundant biological pathways. We propose a research program that will (a) help uncover a critical but yet uncharacterized central metabolic pathway in DIPG tumor cells and (b) provide the groundwork for innovative therapies that simultaneously interrupt two critical and interrelated pathways in DIPGs.