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

it does slow things down in mice, at least.

And it's something that we can test in prospective trials in patients.

Have you started trials on this?

We're gearing up to begin trials.

One of the medicines that we identified that disrupts one particularly important interaction in diffuse midline gliomas, we were able to look back at patient databases and

and ask if a patient was on this particular anti-seizure medicine, did they do better?

Did they live longer?

And this retrospective data analysis did support the idea that this was a useful therapy, that kids who were on this particular anti-seizure medicine, in fact, had better outcomes.

And so we have, you know, both laboratory data, we have retrospective clinical data, and we're gearing up right now to begin prospective clinical trials.

Absolutely.

And I think it's really important to think about targeting the way that the cancer takes advantage of the nervous system as one crucially important pillar of a multi-pronged approach.

Disrupting these interactions

is going to slow down the cancer growth.

It's going to potentially make it more vulnerable to other therapies.

But for these very difficult and very aggressive cancers, we need multimodal approaches.

We have the opportunity to leverage the immune system that has been very effective in some cancer types for treatment and that we can hopefully effectively leverage in both pediatric and adult brain cancers to help clear the tumor from the nervous system.

Yeah, so there's been a great deal of research.

There are a number of what appear to be really promising approaches.

One that I began working on about a decade ago, we wondered if we could leverage CAR T-cell therapy to treat these diffusely infiltrative gliomas, like to sort of send in engineered immune cells that are designed to specifically target and remove cancer cells.

And the first step in immunotherapy is to identify a good target for that immune cell, that engineered immune cell to go after.

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