Cruel Fusion: What a Young Man’s Death Means for Childhood Cancer

March 28, 2017

(Nature) – Fusion proteins are a common theme in childhood cancers, from brain tumours to leukaemias. And Max’s struggle with this one highlights the difficulty of tackling them in young patients. The diseases they cause tend to be aggressive, and the intensive chemotherapy treatments used to fight them can be brutal. It is hard to study paediatric cancers in general, both because they are uncommon and because of the ethical concerns involved in experimenting on children. But perhaps most maddeningly, the fusion proteins themselves, the most obvious point of attack for new therapies, have proved to be slippery targets. “There aren’t too many cancers that just say, ‘Here is my Achilles heel,’” says Damon Reed, a paediatric oncologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. “These are doing that.”