Professor Alan Mackay-Sim was recently named Australian of the Year. This is a wonderful accolade for Professor Mackay-Sim who has been at the forefront of developing neural stem cell concepts, which potentially will lead to treatments for spinal cord or brain injury and many other neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. Professor Mackay-Sim has done his work in Brisbane, and his interest in this field stemmed from early research on […]

“The Age” newspaper has recently reported in the dire situation regarding funding for brain cancer research. The report used the example of a young boy with incurable brain tumour, and lamented the fact that survival for patients with brain cancer has not changed significantly in decades. Not only that, funding for brain cancer lags well behind that for other cancers despite the fact that brain cancer kills more young people […]

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a common virus in our community. Most adults will show serological evidence of of previous exposure. CMV can cause severe disease, but generally this is only in newborns or in immunosuppressed patients, such as those people having had a transplant. In the last few years, it has become clear that CMV can be identified in brain tumour tissue – both in primary gliomas (glioblastoma, astrocytoma, GBM) and […]

In patients who have faced a diagnosis of cancer, and then had treatment, a subsequent “Fear of Recurrence” can be a severe problem. There is a growing literature of this phenomenon in diseases such as breast cancer, but very little if any work has been done in the field of Brain Cancer. This is a typical scenario – a person is diagnosed with a brain cancer (glioblastoma, GBM, malignant glioma), […]