Allison Cheney, Graduate Student

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. To help spread awareness of the different cancers that impact children, we will be profiling a different researcher each week to talk about the cancer they study and how they hope their research will help in the fight against childhood cancer.  

What type of cancer do you research?

I am researching pediatric brain tumors, specifically pediatric high grade gliomas (pHGG) and ependymomas. pHGGs usually affect elementary school aged children, and are incurable and fatal at this time. 

How might this research help children with cancer? 

I am hoping to find out the “cell type of origin” of these tumors. The cell of origin is the cell that gets the first mutations that cause the cancer. Knowing which cell type this occurs in can help identify better targeted treatments that hopefully are less damaging to the patient (children’s brains are still developing, and right now the current treatments for these tumors are harsh and can be damaging). Also, in the very long term, knowing the cell type of origin could theoretically help us prevent the cancer from ever occurring in the first place. 

What do you wish people knew about childhood cancer and cancer research? 

Right now, pediatric cancer doesn’t get enough attention or funding. Most research funding comes from foundations set up by parents who had a child with cancer. And this isn’t enough. 

How did you get into this research? 

I had an adult second cousin die of glioma, but I actually ended up studying pHGG more or less by chance. I inherited this project from a previous grad student who thought this might be a good short project I could work on while rotating in the Vaske lab. I ended up publishing results during that rotation, and four years later, I am still working on it!

What is something surprising you have found during your research? 

Something that surprises me about my work is how little we know about the part of the brain where this cancer usually occurs (the hindbrain). It’s a huge part of the brain, but shockingly few researchers are interested in it, while the cortex, or forebrain, tends to receive much more attention.