Frederico Goldstein was just nine years old when he was first diagnosed with a life-changing brain tumor called medulloblastoma, the most common brain tumor in children.
Frederico, now 17 years old, was living a healthy life with his family in Brazil. He loved school and loved reading. His father, Fernand Goldstein, said he had read all of Agatha Christie’s novels. Then Frederico’s diagnosis was made.
“It’s simply the worst thing for a father or mother to hear,” Fernando told Fox News.
“It’s so sad to see a child suffer from cancer, especially when they have the rest of their lives ahead of them.”
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But there is now a glimmer of hope for the 500 families a year whose children are diagnosed with this type of brain tumor. Thanks to this, there is a groundbreaking possibility. For fundraising activities The Story of a Determined Father and the Doctors at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. A cancer survivor himself, Fernando is determined to find a breakthrough treatment for his son and minimize the brain damage and side effects caused by the treatment. I traveled from Brazil to the United States to find a way to limit my symptoms. This deadly brain tumor.
“Technology and medicine have come a long way in recent decades, but unfortunately that hasn’t been the case for children with brain tumors,” Fernando said.
Many patients experience recurrence. That’s what happened to his son Frederico.
When his disease relapsed in 2019, Fernando collaborated with a leading pediatric brain tumor specialist in the United States, and the Medulloblastoma Initiative was born.
“We assembled a dream team of the best researchers from around the world to focus specifically on one form of medulloblastoma,” said Dr. Roger Packer, director of the Brain Tumor Program at the National Children’s Medical Center in Washington, D.C. I thought so,” he explained.
“Fernando essentially asked me, or challenged me, to see if we could come up with a different approach to develop better treatments faster. We knew that it could take 10 to 15 years from discovery to success to develop a new treatment and prove that it was better. ”
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Medulloblastoma is the most common form of childhood brain tumor, accounting for 20% of all childhood brain tumors. There are 500 new cases diagnosed in the United States each year. Current treatments developed in the 1980s leave children with lifelong cognitive and developmental problems.
Now, they have two FDA-approved treatments on the horizon that could provide a cure and reduce side effects for children undergoing treatment. One is to use vaccines, like the mRNA technology used to create coronavirus vaccines, to change tumor immunology.
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“We hope that they will be approved soon, and in that, there will be two, two-and-a-half slots of new treatments for children with subsets of medulloblastoma. “This should also be generalizable to other brain tumors in the very near future,” Dr. Packer explained.
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Every dollar raised contributes to the scientific research behind the cure.
Fernando said: “We know we have a long road ahead of us, but we still need more support and more people to help all these children.” said. So they ask me to help them. I’m not a doctor so I can’t help them. I will send some of them to Dr. Packer. They see our efforts as their only hope. ”
