Many people strive to find a meaningful career that is challenging, intellectually rewarding and offers a strong sense of purpose; a job that seamlessly combines both personal and professional experience. April Freeman, MPH, has found hers.

April recently joined SonALAsense as Director of Patient Advocacy and Engagement, helping build alliances with patient and trade organizations / associations to raise awareness of, and educate on, sonodynamic therapy and recruit patients for recurrent glioblastoma (GBM) and diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) clinical trials.

This work is the culmination of her life experience, starting in 2012. April was working for Genentech in Washington, DC, when her husband began experiencing debilitating headaches.

“He progressively felt worse to the point where he was just lethargic,” said April. “He said that he really couldn’t move, couldn’t get out of bed. It was just difficult for him to do anything.”

They went to the ER, where he received blood work and a CT scan. The blood tests were fine, but the CT was a different story.

“So, the nurse comes and pulls the curtain back and tells him: “We found a mass on your brain. And I’m sitting there, trying to register it all. What does that even mean?”

Initially, doctors thought he might have fluid in his brain, but it turned out to be much worse – a high-grade glioma. He was given radiation and chemotherapy but none of it helped.

“He was diagnosed in March 2012 and went to hospice in October of the same year,” said April. “We started moving up all our celebrations. Our ten-year anniversary, Thanksgiving, Christmas – everything got moved up so he could celebrate. From the date of diagnosis to the date of death was ten months.”

April was devastated, but she had to focus on her own life and her two young children. She continued at Genentech for a while before moving to Bluebird Bio and then BridgeBio; always working for companies in the rare disease space while looking for a company that was aggressively working on brain tumors.

It was at BridgeBio that she met Mark de Souza, PhD, now CEO at SonALAsense. She was immediately sparked when she learned about sonodynamic therapy, a non-invasive brain tumor treatment, and was compelled to share her story with de Souza because she wanted to be a part of the company that is developing this new non-invasive approach to treat brain tumors.

A Revolutionary Brain Tumor Treatment

Sonodynamic therapy uses aminolevulinic acid (ALA) to disrupt heme metabolism in tumor cells, increasing production of protoporphyrin, a heme precursor. From there, energy from focused ultrasound excites protoporphyrin molecules, which produce reactive oxygen species to destroy cancer cells.

Preclinical and early human trials have shown sonodynamic therapy has been well tolerated. This gives April a great opportunity to change the widely held belief that cancer therapies must be invasive and painful to be effective.

“We have to take this really comprehensive approach to educate and help everyone understand the biology and the possibilities,” said April. “People often feel the simple solution cannot possibly be correct. My philosophy for patient advocacy is that engagement needs to happen early and often. We’re doing something completely different than what’s out there right now and people need to know.”

April is not daunted by the popular wisdom. She knows from her own experience how much pain patients and families go through with GBM and DIPG and how difficult it is to be a caregiver. This is her opportunity to provide these families some potential relief and, most importantly, hope.

“I am a firm believer that there’s a purpose in everything,” she said. “I didn’t watch my husband die from a brain tumor just to say: I went through that. I went through that to give back and to pour myself into other people that are going through that now. I’m fortunate to be in a position to do that.”