NEWS ABOUT THE CURE

What to do When You're Diagnosed With DIPG

When You're First Diagnosed With DIPG Hello everybody. I'm Keith. I'm with The Cure Starts Now. I talked to you a little bit today about what to do when you're newly diagnosed. When you're first diagnosed with DIPG, sometimes it can be very daunting to figure out what's the next steps. At that point, you're pretty much grappling with obviously caring for your child, trying to be able to figure out what exactly has just happened. In many ways you're not ready for the next steps. And those step

What Life is Like on MRI Day

One of the most stressful moments for families battling cancer is going through MRI day to see the progress of the treatments they have chosen.  On top of the stress of finding out the status of the cancer, parents battle the anxiety of possible choices that need to be made, as well as, most children have to be sedated for the procedure, which brings a long list of side effects and jitters.  Most cancer families call all of these piled up nerves as “scanxiety”. Mackenzie is a vibrant 5-year-old,

Why Childhood Brain Cancer is the Final Frontier of Curing Cancer

For decades we’ve talked about “curing” cancer, yet for nearly a century cancer has continued to elude our efforts.  Is it because our research is flawed?  Possibly cancer is just too tough to beat?  I would argue it is a fault of neither; instead, I believe it has to do with our strategy.  Fundamentally we as a society have equated a “cure” with “treatment” and in doing so we have failed those that fight the battle against cancer each and every day.  Certainly we’ve improved odds of survival an

Cleaning Essentials for Cancer Patients

The fear, the anxiety that surrounds all of America today is what cancer families feel every day.  What cold or virus will we bring home from work to our children.  With their compromised immune systems, every interaction with strangers is a potential threat to our children’s health and ability to receive the next chemotherapy treatment.  We live in constant fear that the sniffle from our co-worker will mean a week in the hospital to our kids’ bodies that are already struggling to fight off the

A Unified Strategy For DIPG

The following article originally appeared on Cancer Today courtesy of Marci A. Landsmann A couple who lost their daughter to brain cancer builds a charity that connects parents, hospitals and researchers with data. ENTREPRENEURS KEITH AND BROOKE DESSERICH ​​were used to doing SWOT analyses—an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats—as a step in setting a business plan in motion. These tactics, along with a high tolerance for risk, are how the husband-and-wife team approache

Exciting New Tool Helps DIPG Families Find Trials Easier

This week, The Cure Starts Now rolled out a new tool in their ever expanding arsenal for families fighting Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG).  Building on the extensive repository of research and information at DIPG.org, families can now signup for daily or weekly updates for DIPG specific research to be delivered to their email inbox.  The new tool expands on their already popular research search page at DIPG.org by giving them instant notifications when trials become open or available. 

Characteristics of Long-Term Survivors of DIPG

The following paper was originally published in Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2018.  Researchers compare clinical, radiologic, and histomolecular characteristics between short-term survivors and long-term survivors of DIPG using data compiled from the International DIPG /DMG Registry and their 1,100+ patient records collected.  The DIPG/DMG Registry is fully funded by the DIPG Collaborative and The Cure Starts Now.  A 5 country alliance of over 100 hospitals and over 1,100 DIPG/DMG patients, i

Dr. Adam Green provides an update on his DIPG research for The Cure Starts Now

Toward a Multimodality Cure for DIPG: Investigation of Intratumoral Drug Penetration and Craniospinal Irradiation “We work on a lot of different projects in DIPG, but with our recent Cure Starts Now grants, we wanted to look at some really fundamental questions about how DIPG is treated currently and how we can improve that going forward. So, the current standard of care treatment for DIPG is focal radiation just to the pons and we know that it's transiently effective, but that the tumor always

Are There Any Survivors of DIPG?

The diagnosis of diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) or diffuse midline glioma (DMG) is often casually regarded as a terminal cancer, but what are the true statistics regarding survival? For the first time since the classification of DIPG and DMG we now have these numbers due to the selfless participation of over 1,400 patients in the International DIPG/DMG Registry and the SIOPe (European) DIPG Registry. The largest linked database of DIPG and DMG data comprising the cooperative efforts of

Florida DIPG Family Selected as the Newest Chapter of The Cure Starts Now

Anthony Franzini's family uses the grief of losing their son to create a legacy of cancer research for other kids like him. Cincinnati, OH | January 23, 2020 — The Cure Starts Now Foundation has selected its 41st chapter in Port Orange, Florida in honor of Anthony Franzini who was diagnosed with DIPG in June of 2017. Anthony went through 6 weeks of radiation and chemo treatments, however that didn’t buy him much time. He earned his angel wings four short months after being diagnosed shortly afte