Gabe is a 12-year-old boy diagnosed with an atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumour.
He was diagnosed last year and says simply that it was an awful period in his young life.
"I actually felt a little bit depressed. 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 ..."
The rare childhood cancer, where malignant cells form in the brain, is also known as A-T-R-T.
That was too much of a mouthful, though, so the young boy from New South Wales' Central Coast nicknamed his tumour Gary.
His mother, Rachel Hilditch, says the treatment made her son extremely unwell.
"We went on the, you know, 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."
That journey was hardly a straightforward one.
During an operation to remove 50 per cent of the tumour, Gabe had a stroke, which has greatly affected his mobility.
But the next stage now is rehabilitation, because the cancer has gone into remission.
And a clinical trial starting today, which will enrol more than 400 children across Australia, gives doctors hope that increasing numbers of children can survive the rarest cancers.
The Children's Cancer Institute's Professor Michelle Haber explains.
"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. 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."
The individually tailored treatment could also mean less chemotherapy.
That would mean less short-term suffering and fewer long-term side effects.
The Sydney Children's Hospital's Professor Tracey O'Brien says 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. 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.
