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(Vienna, 9.8.2023) Scientists at St. Anna Children's Cancer Research Institute and the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen have shown that immunotherapy after stem cell transplantation effectively combats certain nerve tumors in children. Crucially, stem cells from a parent provide children with a new immune system that responds much better to immunotherapies. These results of an early clinical trial were published in the prestigious Journal of Clinical Oncology.

With a novel High-Throughput-Screening method the efficacy of numerous drugs can be tested simultaneously. Researchers are now able to quickly and efficiently assess which substances are effective against certain tumors. A team led by Martin Distel, PhD, and Sabine Taschner-Mandl, PhD, of St. Anna Children's Cancer Research Institute has now provided the first guide on how to use this method to test the sensitivity of childhood tumors to different drugs in zebrafish models. The study was published in the Journal npj Precision Oncology.

Scientists led by Sabine Taschner-Mandl, PhD, St. Anna Children's Cancer Research Institute, and Nikolaus Fortelny, PhD, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, are the first to analyze bone marrow metastases from childhood tumors of the nervous system using modern single-cell sequencing analysis. It turns out that cancer cells prevent cells in their environment from fighting the tumor – a process that could be reversed with medication. The findings were published in the renowned journal Nature Communications.