Newcastle cancer researcher Dr Matt Dun was supposed to highlight the importance of more funding for research on Childhood Brain Cancer Awareness Day (which happened on Thursday), through his speech alongside the Federal Health Minister in Melbourne. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to make it.
In the early hours of that same day, his 4-year-old daughter, Josie, was admitted to hospital.
"She is not doing OK. She is coming to the end of her journey," Dr Dun said.
Josie has been fighting DIPG - or diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma - a "ferocious", inoperable cancer that almost exclusively affects children.
Dr Dun, a University of Newcastle and Hunter Medical Research Institute biologist, was already focused on paediatric high grade cancers. But since Josie's diagnosis, he has also turned his attention to understanding DIPG, and developing better treatments for it.
"We wanted to try to highlight the importance of research, and funding research, on Brain Cancer Awareness Day," he said.
Dun states that of the 100 children that die of cancer annually, 36 of them die from brain cancer, and 20 of them die from DIPG. Of the 36, over half of them die due to one particular brain cancer — one that is totally untreatable and have no recognized treatments whatsoever.
"Until we do the work to really understand the biology of the disease, kids are still going to face a bleak prognosis, which is 300 days from diagnosis to death."
I hope scientists would be able to do something about it, and I hope that more funds would be given for this research.
(Image Credit: Newcastle Herald)