A ground-breaking new clinical trial is hoping to increase the survival rate of children with the rarest childhood cancers.
Only 20 per cent of children survive their battles with the deadly disease.
But this new trial that started up on Monday hopes to bring hope for children diagnosed with cancer and their families.
One of the children who have experienced the horrors of the disease is 12-year-old Gabe Smith.
Gabe was diagnosed with an atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumour last year and shares what it was like during this awful period in his life.
“I actually felt a little bit depressed,” he told SBS World News.
“It wasn't fun not being able to see my friends and not being able to go get fresh air, and just being in that room with nobody else but my mum.”
Gabe’s rare childhood cancer, where malignant cells form in the brain, is also known as ATRT.
Gabe's mother, Rachel Hilditch, says his cancer treatment made him extremely unwell. Source: SBS
The diagnosis was too much of a mouthful for the young boy from the New South Wales’ Central Coast and he ended up nicknaming the tumour Gary.
In an attempt to remove 50 per cent of Gary during surgery, Gabe suffered a stroke which greatly affected his mobility.
His mother, Rachel Hilditch, says the cancer treatment also made her son extremely unwell.
“We went on the journey of killing Gary, which meant an intense 13 months of chemotherapy and radiation, very invasive, made him very sick, spent a lot of time in the Children's Hospital. But it's what saved his life,” Ms Hilditch said.
Lucky for Gabe, he is now in remission. But more than 400 other children have enrolled in a new clinical trial with hopes it will improve their chances of survival.
The Children's Cancer Institute's Professor Michelle Haber said they would work to provide a tailored approach of treatment for every child.
"The genetic and biological characteristics of each child's cancer is unique. The best possible way of improving that survival rate is to personalise the treatment,” she told SBS World News.
“We actually take the child's cancer cells and grow them in the laboratory to see - not just to predict, but actually to empirically test - which drug or drugs that child's cancer responds to."
This method could also mean less chemotherapy, which leads to less short-term suffering and fewer long-term side effects.
The Sydney Children's Hospital's Professor Tracey O'Brien said personalised treatments could be a huge breakthrough.
"It's a game-changer. Using personalised medicine, it's going to change how we deliver therapeutic options to the children that we treat,” Prof O’Brien said.
“I think that it's going to bring us to our goal of one day bringing child deaths to zero."
The national clinical trial will run until at least 2019, and data gathered from the program will be shared with research partners around Australia and around the world.
