Lucas was diagnosed with brain stem glioma - a disease that is difficult to cure, but miraculously his tumor completely disappeared after treatment with medication.

When Lucas (who lives in Belgium) was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor at age 6, everyone thought he wouldn't live because the prognosis was so poor.

Doctor Jacques Grill, who directly treated Lucas, became emotional when recalling that year when he had to tell Lucas's parents that the boy was about to die. However, the miracle was that after 7 years, when Lucas was 13 years old, traces of the tumor in his brain had completely disappeared.

The tumor in Lucas' brain is called diffuse pontine glioma. (Illustration photo: Shutterstock).

Miracle

According to the researchers who treated Lucas, he is the first child in the world to be cured of brain stem glioma - a very dangerous type of cancer. Dr. Grill said Lucas beat the odds to survive.

According to AFP, the tumor in Lucas's brain has the full name of diffuse pontine glioma (DIPG). Every year, about 300 children in the United States and about 100 children in France are diagnosed with this tumor.

Thanks to the promise of medicine, about 85% of children can survive after being diagnosed with cancer. However, the chances of survival for children with DIPG are still very poor and most do not live more than a year after diagnosis.

Radiation therapy can sometimes slow the rate at which a tumor metastasizes, but currently, no drug is strong enough to cure the disease completely. Lucas is a rare case who was tested for medicine and luckily recovered.

When diagnosed with DIPG, Lucas was taken by his family to France to participate in the BIOMEDE trial. This is a program to test treatments, including drug trials, for children and adolescents with brain tumors.

Doctor Jacques Grill is the person involved in treating Lucas. (Photo: France 3TV).

From the beginning, Lucas had a very strong reaction to a cancer drug called everolimu s. After continuously taking the medicine, MRI results showed that the tumor had completely disappeared.

In addition to Lucas, seven other children with DIPG were also given medication and lived for many more years, but only Lucas' tumor disappeared.

The reason is that Lucas responded to the medication, while the other children did not. Doctors guess that this may also depend on the " biological characteristics" of each tumor.

"Lucas's tumor has a very rare mutation, which we believe makes the cells much more sensitive to drugs ," said Dr. Jacques Grill.

Dr. Jacques Grill added that he had never seen a case like Lucas. But even though the tumor disappeared, he still did not dare to stop the treatment regimen.

Lucas recovered thanks to cancer treatment drugs, but researchers still have not found an answer to the question of why the boy was able to recover so completely. Scientists are also carefully studying this case in the hope of finding similar treatments for other patients.

Hope to find a solution to the incurable disease

After Lucas fully recovered, researchers continued to study abnormalities in the tumors of patients with DIPG. At the same time, they also sought to create " organoid" tumors , meaning clumps of cells created in the laboratory.

"Lucas's case really gives hope to researchers," researcher Marie-Anne Debily, who was involved in creating the organoid, told AFP .

Now, Ms. Debily and her colleagues will try to recreate in vitro the mutations they found in Lucas's cancer cells. The team's aim is to recreate these mutations to see if the tumor can be suppressed as effectively as in Lucas' case.

If the regenerative activity is effective, the next step for the research team is to find a drug that works on the cells in the tumor.

However, the journey to finding a cure for DIPG is still very long. The research team predicts it will take an average of 10-15 years to find a viable treatment.