Dr. Michelle Monje

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133 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Dr. Michelle Monje’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Science Friday · Why is brain cancer so hard to treat? · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

One of the real problems with these diffusely infiltrative kind of intrinsic diseases like diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma

is that there isn't resection tissue to study in the laboratory.

You can't surgically remove these cancers.

And at the time, they weren't even biopsied.

That has changed.

Pediatric neurosurgeons have been trained to do very... Expertly skilled neurosurgeons have been trained to do

biopsies.

But at the time, there was not even biopsy tissue of diffuse midline gliomas.

And so I thought maybe we could apply those techniques from neurobiology to culture, perhaps in the early postmortem period, these tumor cells.

Exactly, because we had no way to study this in the laboratory.

There was no model.

This was just at the time, this is in the early 2000s to 2010s, and next generation sequencing had just come to be.

And then very early in my clinical fellowship as a pediatric neuro-oncology fellow, one of my

young patients with DIPG, his family asked if they could donate his organs after death.

There's limited organ donation that can happen in children with cancer.

We did donate what we could, but I told them that they could donate his tumor if they were interested, and they were very interested in that.

And so when he passed, they donated his brain in the early hours after his passing, and I was able to culture his tumor.

And that became the first cell culture and xenograft mouse model of DIPG.

And that was really a breakthrough, that that child's donation allowed us for the very first time to look at how these cells behave, try to understand what normal cell types they resemble, try to understand what potential therapies they might respond to.

And collaboratively with many others engaged in broad drug screening efforts, using these patient-derived pediatric brain cancer models, trying to identify therapies that might target the cancer.

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