Stanford Radio

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: "Michelle Monje: New therapies for brain cancer" A deepening understanding of how the healthy brain grows and functions is leading to exciting new brain cancer therapies that are both more effective and easier on patients. Brain cancers are known to be elusive and clever killers, but Michelle Monje, associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences, is helping to find new treatments through a better understanding of how healthy brain cells develop and how cancers often hijack those very same processes in order to grow themselves. Monje says that the last decade has seen tremendous progress in our understanding of how cancers thrive and in the development of new drugs and therapies to kill the killers. Unfortunately, many chemotherapy drugs powerful enough to kill cancers also cause lasting impairment of the patient’s cognitive abilities, a condition known among doctors and patients as “chemobrain.” Monje is on the hunt for more effective and safer treatm