Cells from girl who overcame brain tumor can help other young patients

At age 5, Mary Scott Gallus needed three surgeries to remove a tennis ball-sized tumor from her brain. 

Before the second procedure, her neurosurgeon posed a question to her parents: Would they donate this portion of her tumor to research? AJ and Tom Gallus agreed, saying they would do anything to keep another family from having to endure their past few days.

In the year since Mary Scott’s successful surgeries, she has relearned how to walk and excelled in kindergarten. She also met her two goals: to swim and ride a bike again. 

Her neurosurgeon, Ramin Eskandari, and his neurosurgery research colleague, Arabinda Das, met a goal, too. 

At the Charleston Brain Tumor Walk held earlier this month, Eskandari surprised the Gallus family with a photo of Mary Scott’s cell line, grown in an MUSC lab. Cell lines replicate a tumor and allow researchers to perform experiments in hopes of creating less invasive, less painful treatments. 

Mary Scott wound up in Eskandari’s operating room last year the day after receiving a diagnosis of juvenile pilocytic astrocytoma — a benign, slow-growing tumor and the most common brain tumor in children. She would lose one-quarter of the right side of her cerebellum. 

AJ still cries when she remembers asking Eskandari if her daughter would make it. “He said, ‘I’ll be there to see her walk down the aisle,’” AJ said recently. “From there, I knew we were in the best hands possible, and we received the best care at MUSC.”

When Eskandari went in for the second surgery, Das met him in the operating room and immediately began working to grow tumor cells in the lab. 

“This type of tumor grows slowly and is picky,” Eskandari said. “There’s no other pediatric juvenile pilocytic astrocytoma that we know of growing in the lab.”

Researchers working with cell lines from malignant tumors have discovered treatments that use a patient’s own immune system to attack the tumor and avoid more punishing treatments, such as chemotherapy, radiation and even surgery. Replicating Mary Scott’s cells, according to Eskandari, provides access to the juvenile pilocytic astrocytoma cell line to researchers around the world. 

“It will allow one person’s tumor to be researched in many different ways to help everyone with that tumor,” he said. “Although rare, this tumor is the most common brain tumor in children. So this cell line means even more, because there are many more children who require surgery and other therapies, like chemotherapy, for these tumors.”  
He named the cell line MSG for Mary Scott Gallus. 

When AJ and Tom Gallus look back on their darkest hours last year, they remember imagining this outcome. “We were hoping and praying that one day — we didn’t know it would be this soon — that it would help future children,” AJ said. “We hope that no child ever has to go through what Mary Scott went through. We are overwhelmed and blown away and so grateful and thankful to Dr. Eskandari and MUSC.”