Georgia Tech’s professor of Biomedical Engineering (BME), Ravi Bellamkonda, has been awarded a EUREKA grant of more than one million which was provided by the National Cancer Institute to develop a treatment for brain tumors that lead to cancer.  Along with Bellamkonda, Tobey MacDonald, M.D. and Barun Brahma, M.D., both of Children's Healthcare in Atlanta, will collaborate on the treatment effort.  The team intends to use the EUREKA grant to develop and innovative approach to treating medulloblastomas, highly malignant brain tumors found in over 20% of children with brain tumors.  Because radiation therapy has damaging long-term effects on young children, it cannot be implemented and thus reduces their chances of survival.  Currently, children with this cancer have a five-year survival rate of only 50-70%.  Of the survivors, many must live with a lower quality of life than healthy children.

BME's Bellamkonda and his team plan to create pathways in the brain, created by polymer thin film systems, that direct the tumor to a drug designed to kill the malignant cells or make for easier tumor extraction.  This minimally invasive procedure and its non-toxic materials and devices could open many doors to successfully treating tumors in previously inoperable regions of the body, including brain stem tumors.