Brain tumours are the leading cause of non-accidental death in children in Canada, but little is known about when these tumours form or how they develop. Researchers from SickKids, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC), have recently identified the cells that are thought to give rise to certain brain tumours in children and discovered that these cells first appear in the embryonic stage of a mammal’s development – far earlier than they had expected.
