Intrathecal drug delivery to brain tumours

Mr Macarthur talks to ecancertv at Children with Cancer UK’s workshop on Drug Delivery in Paediatric Brain Tumours in London, UK.

He discusses his experience of intrathecal administration of chemotherapy to target brain tumours in children.

Getting treatment across the blood-brain barrier is one of the challenges when treating childhood brain cancers, he observes, and injecting chemotherapy into the cerebral spinal fluid is one possible way around this.

Although not a first-line approach, it is potentially suitable for brain tumours that have metastasised, with medulloblastomas and ependymoma the most common tumour types treated so far in Nottingham.