Childhood brain cancer breakthrough

Academics at the University of Nottingham hope the breakthrough will mean improved drugs can be manufactured to treat ependymoma, the third most common form of brain cancer in children.

Until now relatively little has been known about the disease but researchers at the Children's Brain Tumour Research Centre hope a new understanding of ependymoma will mean new drugs will have fewer side effects.

Their study, which was carried out on behalf of the Children's Cancer and Leukaemia Group and funded by the Joseph Foote charity, was published in the British Journal of Cancer.

In the UK about 35 children are diagnosed with ependymoma each year, while around half of these are under the age of three. The survival rate for the disease is 50%.

Professor Richard Grundy, the study's lead author, said: "Understanding the biological causes of cancer is vitally important as it will help us to develop drugs that target abnormal genes in cancer cells but not in healthy cells, which is what traditional chemotherapy treatments do.

"More accurately targeted treatments will cause fewer side effects than conventional chemotherapy and be more effective. So this is an important finding which we hope will lead to the development of new treatments for ependymoma."

The university says that about 300 children under 15 are diagnosed with a brain tumour each year in the UK.