when cancer was unyielding,Carson whispered, “momma, make sure they study those tumors in my brain, it’s hard to have cancer & if they study those tumors, maybe it will help the next kid not die from cancer like I am…
January 12 2010, Carson died…
Some of those tumors were shipped to The Brain Tumor Program at Texas Children’s cancer Center in Houston…
January 13, 2010, we received this email…
“We received the tumor samples this morning and the tumor cells were in good shape. We have just completed the injection of viable tumor cells into the brains of 10 mice. Hopefully, some of them will develop tumors over time and we will then be able to use this precious model to study critical questions involved in tumor metastasis. I will let you know the progress of this model development effort.
Please accept my sincere sympathy on your loss of Carson, he is such a brave young man. May God bless you and your family during this time and always.”
-Xiao-Nan Li, M.D.,PhD.
Other correspondence the last 3 years…
The normal tissues from Carson are extremely important because most of the other tumors we have collected do not have matched normal tissue to compare.
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We have identified a set of genes that may play critical roles in medulloblastoma invasion and metastasis. We are using the tumor tissues from Carson to confirm our findings, and our goal is to develop new therapies that will block this deadly process.
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There is emerging data indicating that the primary medulloblastoma tumor cells (in the cerebellum) is not exactly the same as tumor cells metastasized to the spinal cord. It is very important to test new anti-metastatsis strategies in biologically accurate (and real) metastatic tumor cells. I believe our data will be clinically relevant and have a better chance of translation into clinical trials.
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Tumor invasion and metastasis are at the very top priority of my lab, I now have two additional postdoctoral fellows working on this project
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So on Friday, I met Dr. Li…he is kind & passionate & brilliant…
He is studying those tumors in Carson’s brain…