When Lucas was diagnosed with a rare type of brain tumor at age six, everyone understood that he would die within a couple years.
Jacques Grill, a doctor in France, becomes emotional when he recalls having to tell Lucas’s parents that their son was going to die.
But seven years later, Lucas is now a healthy 13-year-old with no trace of cancer. The tumor is all gone.
Lucas, a native of Belgium, is the first kid on Earth to have been cured of brainstem glioma, an unusually lethal cancer.
“Lucas beat all the odds” to survive, said Grill, who heads the brain tumor branch of the Gustave Roussy cancer center in Paris.
The tumor, technically known as diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), is diagnosed every year in around 300 children in the United States, and about 60 in France.
Medical advances mean that 85 percent of children now survive for more than five years after being diagnosed with cancer.
But the future for most kids with the DIPG tumor remains bleak – most do not live even a year beyond diagnosis. Only 10 percent are still two years after their cancer is detected:
Radiotherapy can sometimes slow the rapid march of the aggressive tumor, but no drug has been shown to be effective against it.
Lucas and his family traveled from Belgium to France so that he could become one of the first patients to join the BIOMEDE trial which tests potential new drugs for DIPG.
From the start, Lucas responded strongly to the cancer drug everolimus, which he was randomly assigned.
“Over a series of MRI scans, I watched as the tumor completely disappeared,” Grill told AFP.
But the doctor did not dare stop the treatment regimen – at least until a year and a half ago, when Lucas revealed he was no longer taking the drugs anyways.
“I don’t know of any other case like him in the world,” Grill said.
Exactly why Lucas so fully recovered, and how his case could help other children like him in the future, remains to be seen.
Seven other children in the trial survived years after being diagnosed, but only Lucas’s tumor completely vanished.
Scientists have developed tiny robots made of human cells to repair damaged cells. Nanorobots are also being used to fight cancer: “In a major advancement in nanomedicine, Arizona State University scientists…have successfully programmed nanorobots to shrink tumors by cutting off their blood supply.”
“Surgeons and scientists have developed a world-first blood test for brain cancer that experts say could revolutionize diagnosis, speed up treatment and boost survival rates,” reports The Guardian. Despite advances in fighting other kinds of cancer, “brain tumors have remained notoriously difficult to diagnose. They affect hundreds of thousands of people worldwide each year, and kill more children and adults under the age of 40 … than any other cancer.
Robots may also help remove brain cancers. Robots can fit in small spaces in people’s bodies that a surgeon can’t reach without cutting through living tissue.
Doctors overseas are using artificial intelligence to detect cases of breast cancer more effectively. Artificial intelligence is now developing highly-effective antibodies to fight disease.
Doctors recently used a surgical robot to carry out incredibly complicated spinal surgery. Doctors also recently did the first robotic liver transplant in America.
