>> For us, removing the tumor is only part of the job. We know that most of the brain
tumors we remove, even with getting all of it out, which is certainly the first step to the
best outcome, are going to come back. And we think our job is not just to remove the
tumors, but also to find other treatments that are more effective, or at least less toxic.
>> The reason kids have tumors is often very different than the reason an adult might get
a tumor or cancer. It's not because they smoked, or were out in the sun too long. It's because
something went array. What goes wrong is unique for that patient. When you say brain tumor,
you really mean a collection of diseases that are very heterogeneous, and complicated, and
very different from one another. So kids' tumors are not only very different from adults',
among them, among kids' tumors themselves, there's a great diversity of biology.
>> Only recently did we start to unravel the genomic underpinnings of what is even the
makeup of the tumors.
>> And so having a molecular understanding, having a detailed understanding of what it
is that's wrong within the cell, suddenly opens up doors to intervene in an entirely
different way. There's commonalities that we try to discover and discern. But we really
treat each individual tumor as a unique entity.
>> What I'm most excited about right now at CHOP is our tumor consortium. To me that's
the future of tumor research. And that's where we're going to find the cures.
>> It's multiple institutions dedicated with a vision of collecting and sharing tumor tissue
amongst research scientists.
>> So when Jay takes out the tumor, his focus is on taking out as much of the tumor as safely
as possible. The minute that happens, the blood and tumor goes up to the pathology suite.
The pathologist then begins to divide the tumor in multiple different ways to allow
us to do the kind of research that we're doing.
The tumors are frozen in liquid nitrogen at -200 degrees Celsius. They are snap frozen
in a way that essentially stops everything at once. At the same time, pieces of tumor
are frozen very slowly that will allow us to then take that tumor and keep it alive forever.
The tumor than comes to the laboratory where we then try to extract cells from the tumor.
And it begins to give us a first view on how the cells really behave. And provides an opportunity
for us to really study the cells as they are essentially dividing in a petri dish. The
blood is processed to extract DNA, RNA and cells from the blood, and gets distributed
across different storage systems.
>> CHOP as an institution and we as a laboratory have invested so much money in the infrastructure
here to support the research from other institutions who can do the science and have great scientist,
but maybe don't have the money to do the sequencing. So we provide it for them.
>> The goal is to share that information in real time amongst the whole community of
scientists. And it's annotated so we're not just a scientist working in isolation. We're
annotating the tumor tissue with the actual clinical information.
>> They make all that information available to them at the same time as us. We're not
interesting in any kind of scientific advantage. We're interested in scientific cures.
>> This intersection of the scientists and the clinicians working together and having
that combined information is really what's going to push the field ahead.
>> And so we began looking at these benign, so-called benign tumors. These were low-grade
gliomas. And began looking at their genomes. And when we began looking at the genomes,
we found that a very large number of them had only one thing wrong with them.
>> We know that these tumors look identical under the microscope, but have different genetic
abnormalities. So now we, you know, check those tumors for whatever abnormality they
have.
>> In a very short amount of time, we've gone from identifying, essentially, the broken
part in the tumor, to initiating clinical trials. They're no longer going to be treated
simply as a patient that has a tumor that we're gonna treat indiscriminately with a
compound that's just targeting rapidly dividing cells. We're going to treat you as a patient
that has a specific mutation in a specific gene with a compound that we think only targets
that mutation.
>> So you want to know exactly what medication you're giving and matching it to the genetic
abnormality. The goal is to ultimately have that kind of information and power for all
the tumors that we resect.
>> We never make the claim that what I do in the laboratory today will cure that person's
disease today. But many families recognize that research is an ongoing process with an
unpredictable time scale. And many parents and families, I think, very soon will recognize
how important is was to think about what happens to the tissue after it's out. How will it
impact the knowledge that we derived from that tissue towards the discovery process.
And how it might help their own child, but for sure will help children in the future.
>> We've had patients in our lab working on the specific tumor that they have. And I think
it gives it a real human touch to our researchers over there to realize that, you know, these
patients are real. And these diseases are real. And the person next to them may be alive
because of what they're doing.
>> Over the summer I did research. I had the awesome opportunity to do research in Dr.
Storm and Adam Resnick's neurosurgery lab. And I was doing brain tumor research, which
was very cool. Breakthroughs are happening. Breakthroughs are happening every day here at CHOP.