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8 Headlines Saving crucial time in THE RACE TO GIVE HOPE I t’s not for want of trying. There have been 58,000 research papers and some 1900 clinical trials, yet genuine progress proves elusive. In an attempt to set things right, Dr McConnell (Victoria University of Wellington) joined forces with Devlin Forsythe on his PhD that aimed to develop a better mouse model of glioblastoma. Most of the current models involve mice that have no immune system. That’s because the model relies on growing human tumour tissue in the mouse and if the immune system was intact, it would reject this tissue outright. But treatments are known to react with the immune cells in reality, so having no immune system means responses to therapies may be seen in the mouse model that later prove ineffective. Dr McConnell says the lack of an effective mouse model has been a cause of “utter frustration” because the existing ones only loosely reflect the characteristics of the disease. Her goal was to develop a mouse model with an intact immune system so that results would be a more reliable version of human glioblastoma. A big question has gnawed away at Associate Professor Melanie McConnell for some time: why is there such exciting progress with treatments for other cancers, but not for brain cancer? The treatment of glioblastoma in particular hasn’t advanced in decades.