ABC News Australia, ran a story featuring our very own Lucy Jones, to announce the potential revolutionary new drug treatment for fatal childhood cancer - neuroblastoma.

Professor Michelle Haber’s and Professor Murray Norris’s team at Children’s Cancer Institute discovered that a drug called DFMO was much more effective at killing neuroblastoma cells with the addition of a polyamine uptake inhibitor called AMXT 1501 (developed by Aminex Therapeutics). Should their promising pre-clinical research be successful, potentially new treatments can be developed for this devastating disease and improve survival rates for children with hard-to-treat relapsed neuroblastomas.

Exciting breakthrough with a combination drug therapy

Neuroblastoma Australia is supporting research into the drug DFMO conducted by Children’s Cancer Institute (CCI) . DFMO has been in clinical trial for a number of years and has shown it can affect neuroblastoma tumours. The Team at CCI found that if DFMO were combined with a polyamine inhibitor, the drug becomes far more powerful in killing neuroblastoma cells. Polyamines are molecules which fuel the rapid growth of neuroblastoma cells.  As a result of their world-class research, a new trial testing this combination will be started in 2022. There is a strong rationale that this could ultimately lead to the development of potentially new treatments for this devastating disease and improve survival rates for children with hard-to-treat relapsed neuroblastomas.

As this research has shown such promising data to date, organisations in Europe and the US are also keen to support a clinical trial. It is expected that a trial involving US, Australia and Europe could be started in 2022 which will help accelerate this research.

Watch the story.

What you can do

Each new research and each new breakthrough gives families of children with neuroblastoma - hope, hope for a cure and a promise of better treatment options. Please support our appeals and our quest to find better and safer treatments for children diagnosed with neuroblastoma. For, we can't do it without you and they can't do it without you.

Whether you can contribute a little or a lot, every donation is important. It all adds up to make a big difference to children battling this aggressive cancer.

Every Child deserves the chance to grow up.