The Brave Bunny Fund raises money for research efforts related to hepatoblastoma relapse.
Hepatoblastoma is a rare cancerous tumor of the liver and most commonly affects children younger than three years-old. Treatment options include chemotherapy, tumor resection, and liver transplantation. Despite undergoing a carefully determined treatment plan, recurrence of the tumor occurs approximately 16% of the time in which case the treatment options are more aggressive and limited.
Hepatoblastoma has a high success rate if caught early, however many are not diagnosed until stage III or IV as symptoms are difficult to distinguish in toddlerhood. Symptoms include a swollen abdomen, nausea, stomach pain, etc. Due to late stage diagnosis, not only are the treatment options more intense, but the chances for relapse are higher. Additionally, the long-term side effects from the various chemotherapies can be devastating including permanent hearing loss, infertility, cardiotoxicity, and secondary cancers.
Our purpose is to provide funding directly to a team of doctors and scientists at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital who are focused on hepatoblastoma research. The goal is to find the best course of treatment to procure long-term survival with minimal side-effects. 100% of donations to the Brave Bunny Fund benefit hepatoblastoma research. Specific projects we are helping to fund include:
Creating and maintaining a prospective US patient registry of relapsed hepatoblastoma. Currently there is not a centralized location to log patient treatment regimen and outcome. If a child relapses, their team uses a “best guess” approach for next steps based on their limited experience with prior patients. The registry provides oncologists and families access to data that was not otherwise available and empowers them to make an optimal treatment decision. Please visit https://rrhblregistry.org/index.html for further information.
Cisplatin sodium thiosulfate study - Cisplatin is the main chemotherapy drug used to combat hepatoblastoma. Although effective at killing cancer cells, the drug also causes irreversible hearing loss. Sodium thiosulfate (STS) protects hearing and is FDA approved for use in non-metastactic cancer. However, high risk patients have not been approved to receive STS due to concerns it will inhibit the effectiveness of cisplatin. The goal of the cisplatin STS study at Cincinnati Children’s is to show that STS is safe to use in high risk patients (following a certain protocol), limiting the negative effects of chemo. Refer to https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05756660 for the clinical study.
Lab research - we are helping fund three lab projects at Cincinnati Children’s:
Dr. Nikolai Timchenko lab: researching aggressive hepatoblastoma which is characterized by chemo-resistance and multiple nodules or metastases at diagnosis, all correlating to a worse prognosis. Dr. Timchenko has identified several critical molecular events that cause development of aggressive hepatoblastoma and is now testing drugs that might inhibit the disease.
Dr. Alexander Bondoc lab: studies development of hepatoblastoma by growing tumor fragments in mice. The patient’s human tissue of hepatoblastoma is obtained at time of surgical resection and implanted into genetically engineered mice. The goal is to identify novel mechanisms of hepatoblastoma development that may ultimately lead to novel agents or pharmaceuticals to treat the disease.
Avatar program: every tumor resected in the previous year is rapidly grown and as a result, drug testing data is quickly available within 3-4 weeks of surgery. This helps confirm which type of chemo to use in real time.