World first as boy, 13, cured of ‘brutal’ brain cancer | Tech News [Video]

When Lucas was diagnosed with a rare type of brain tumour at the age of six, there was no doubting the prognosis.

His doctor Jacques Grill gets emotional when he remembers having to tell Lucas’s parents that their son was going to die.

However, seven years later, Lucas is now 13 years old and there is no trace of the tumour left.

The Belgian boy is the first child in the world to have been cured of brainstem glioma, a particularly brutal cancer, according to the researchers who treated him.

‘Lucas beat all the odds’ to survive, said Grill, head of the brain tumour programme at the Gustave Roussy cancer centre in Paris.

The tumour, which has the full name diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), is diagnosed in hundreds of children every year across the globe.

Ahead of International Childhood Cancer Day tomorrow, the medical community has praised advances that mean 85% of children now survive more than five years after being diagnosed with cancer.

But the …