Of all the world's problems, perhaps the most heart-breaking is childhood cancer. It attacks the vulnerable and cuts lives tragically short. Alice Alhaj Kadour ’23, PhDx’27 is part of a UW effort to find a cure for diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), one of the most aggressive forms of childhood cancer — one that attacks the brain and is uniformly fatal. As part of UW–Madison’s Tamplin Lab, Alhaj Kadour is looking for creative ways to better understand how DIPG develops, pointing the way, ultimately, toward a cure.
What got you interested in cancer research?
One of my grandfathers had really horrible lung cancer when I was a kid, and he passed away from that. Ever since then I was very intrigued by medicine and cancer biology and oncology. I initially started my undergrad on a pre-med route, [but] I wanted to do more. There were so many times when all we could do was just make people comfortable, and I wanted to be behind the scenes trying to find ways to help these people, even if it’s a few generations later.
Why study DIPG?
It is very devastating how this cancer only hits children and it has very devastating outcomes. The kids usually only survive eight to 11 months. … There has been a lot of research, but there hasn’t been a lot of advancements to improve patient outcomes. As I started learning more, I became really fascinated with just the biological mechanisms and how much we could learn from this new model that we were developing and the potential for improvements.
You’re trying to use zebra fish to develop a model that will help you see how DIPG develops. Why is that work important?
One of the main gaps in the field that this project aims to fill is looking at earlier tumor development. A lot of the [previous] research has been studying the tumor biology as it’s developed. That’s been really important for helping a little bit with patient outcomes and improving just the median survival a little bit. But since these tumors seem to be so aggressive and so untreatable by the time that they’re caught, we thought that it would be really good if we could learn a little bit before that point and see if there’s anything that we can target or look out for before [the tumor] gets to the point where we can’t do anything.
Read more about Alhaj Kadour and the UW’s work with DIPG in On Wisconsin magazine.
