First child cured of rare brain tumour ‘offers real hope’

PARIS: When Lucas was diagnosed with a rare type of brain tumour at the age of six, there was no doubting the prognosis.

French doctor Jacques Grill gets emotional when he remembers having to tell Lucas’s parents that their son was going to die. However, seven years later, Lucas is now 13 years old and there is no trace of the tumour left.

The Belgian boy is the first child in the world to have been cured of brainstem glioma, a particularly brutal cancer, according to the researchers who treated him.

“Lucas beat all the odds” to survive, said Grill, head of the brain tumour programme at the Gustave Roussy cancer centre in Paris.

The tumour, which has the full name diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), is diagnosed every year in around 300 children in the United States, and up to 100 in France.

Ahead of International Childhood Cancer Day on Thursday, the medical community has praised advances that mean 85 per cent of children now survive more than five years after being diagnosed with cancer.

But the outlook for children with the DIPG tumour remains grim _ most do not live a year beyond diagnosis. A recent study found that only 10 per cent were alive two years on.

Radiotherapy can sometimes slow the rapid march of the aggressive tumour, but no drug has been shown to be effective against it.