Fall Funding Features Fearless Fighter

Meningioma Mommas has been hard at work behind the scenes during these unprecedented and challenging times to ensure ongoing critical research. We are grateful for our generous second family supporters for making these grants possible.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Nader Sanai, Director of the Ivy Brain Tumor Center at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, and Dr. Hiro Wakimoto, a Tawingo Endowed Scholar in Neurosurgery at the Brain Tumor Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, are our latest award recipients. Both researchers share our passion and mission to better understand, treat, and eventually eradicate meningiomas.

These research grants honor Livi Jones, our longtime resilient ‘fearless fighter’ who has battled multiple meningiomas and undergone countless surgeries for over 18 years. Her mother, Jenny, joined on her behalf in 2003, not long after Meningioma Mommas launched seeking support, and to this day remains an active member. Livi had her first craniotomy two weeks before beginning kindergarten. She grew up spending her summer, Christmas and spring breaks recovering from additional surgeries. Livi has never stopped fighting. Multiple meningiomas. Check. Acoustic neuroma. Check. NF2. Check. Epilepsy. Check. Her journey has had an incredible and inspirational impact on our meningioma community. Livi captures the essence of those living with and combating a meningioma brain tumor. We would also like to wish Livi a very HAPPY 24th BIRTHDAY! You deserve to celebrate all month long.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two-time award recipient receives $30,000 Award!

Our collaboration with Dr. Nader Sanai began in 2016 with an initial $15,000 grant for his Phase 0 atypical and malignant meningioma trial. The encouraging results are now paving the path for the FDA to consider approval for the first-of-its-kind drug treatment for aggressive meningiomas. We are very excited by these developments and continue our commitment with our latest gift of $30,000.

“Our multidisciplinary team is accelerating drug discovery and precision medicine to rapidly identify the most promising first-in-class therapies to treat these tumors. We are grateful for the continued support of Meningioma Mommas so that we may continue to move beyond the status quo to discover a cure.”–Dr. Sanai.

 

 

 

Hiro is our $101,198 HERO!

Dr. Hiro Wakimoto is a five-time grant recipient having received a total of $101,198 in funding since Meningioma Mommas first partnered with him and his team in 2017. We recently awarded Dr. Wakimoto with a $25,000 gift.

He is humble and truly regarded as a hero for his tireless efforts to discover effective therapies for treatment-resistant meningiomas. He recently established a partnership with a Chinese team to further expedite research. You can learn more about this new therapeutic approach below.

Erastin induced ferroptosis in meningioma 2021[6]

Despite Covid setbacks, Dr. Wakimoto has increased his hands on lab time and research unraveling the challenges meningiomas present.

Dr. Wakimoto shares the following:

“The generous support from the Meningioma Mommas has been vital for us to accomplish our mission. I am very grateful and cannot say thank you enough. The last 12-18 months have not been easy for us like anyone else, but we have strived to make progress in our sciences on meninigioma. We have been studying and developing new effective therapies that are based on cancer killing viruses (oncolytic virus). We have shown that targeted agents called histone deacetylase inhibitors enhance oncolytic virus therapy for meningioma, and we are trying to wrap up this project into a manuscript. Another virus related project uses a novel oncolytic virus to introduce light-reactive protein, which has been shown to induce increased meningioma cell killing by combining effects of virus and protein photo-activation. We are excited to advance this project by testing meningioma models in animals.”