Amanda Bekric and her husband Adnan from Andover endured what no parent should — the loss of their 4-year-old daughter Lejla from brain cancer in 2017.

“When your 1-year-old, who hasn’t even learned to walk yet, and you’re told they have this brain tumor, that she’s going to most likely pass away,” she says. “Initially, when a child is diagnosed from these forms of cancer, they are given roughly 9-12 months.”

But doctors in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania were able to extend Lejla’s life by two years, after she enrolled in a vaccine trial that uses a synthetic protein to fight back against the cancer.

“She learned how to walk, learned how to talk, go to school, make friends, have social life, travel with her family, and banter with her siblings,” Bekric notes.

Now, researchers in a lab at the University of Minnesota, using a drug called CD200AR-L, have developed their own vaccine to battle brain cancer in kids.

It’s the only facility in the world using this specific drug in the fight against diffuse midline glioma, or DMG.

The vaccine is licensed to OX2 Therapeutics, a biotech spinoff run by U of M researchers Michael Olin and Dr. Chris Moertel.

“Pediatric brain tumors, it’s a death sentence,” Olin declares. “My goal is to cure or extend life as well as the quality of life in these children because right now, there’s no cure.”

The vaccine stimulates the immune system to attack brain tumors.

However, researchers found those cancerous cells fight back by releasing proteins that affect the immune response.

But now, the U of M team has developed a synthetic peptide that can counteract the cancer.

“The new peptides that are added to it helps overcome some of the inherent resistance, some of the underlying resistance that brain tumor cells have to vaccine therapy,” Dr. Anne Bendel, a pediatric oncologist at Children’s Minnesota explains. “We can’t do surgery, we can’t remove these tumors based on their location because you would not have function of your brain stem, which is needed to breathe.”

Bendel says she launched the vaccine trial just weeks ago.

One patient, a 7-year-old boy, is already under treatment.

Participants in the trial will receive the vaccine three times a week to start and, eventually, every other month.

Bendel hopes to initially recruit about 12 patients between the ages of two and 25.

The trial is expected to run up to two years.

“It’s one of the worst things we have to do, is tell families that their child has a type of tumor that’s not curable,” Bendel says. “We’re pretty excited that maybe this is going to be hopefully an answer for this tumor.”

For her part, Bekric says it was a blessing to see her daughter get those additional two years.

She hopes this research will help other kids battling cancer. “Kids only know how to live and play and love,” she declares. “She was able to have those opportunities.”