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CJ Carr starts at quarterback for Notre Dame tonight, and his little brother Chad changed what doctors know about the cancer that took him. Chad Carr was five years old. He was diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma. DIPG. It grows in the brain stem, it cannot be cut out, and across hundreds of clinical trials the outlook for it has barely moved. Fourteen months later he was gone. His grandfather is Lloyd Carr, who coached Michigan to a national championship. His mother is Tammi Carr. The family donated his tumor. That has to happen within hours. Most families are never asked at all, because most doctors cannot bring themselves to raise it in that room on that night. The Carrs said yes. "This was Chad's final physical gift," Tammi said. Because they had the whole tumor instead of a needle biopsy, researchers at Michigan were able to sequence six separate regions of it. "Typically with a biopsy, we get a single snapshot of the genetic characteristics of the tumor," said Dr. Carl Koschmann, the pediatric oncologist who led the study. Chad's tumor was 4.6 centimeters across. "The current prognosis for DIPG remains bleak despite hundreds of previous clinical trials," Koschmann said. What they found in Chad was a mutation in a gene called PTEN. Both copies of it. In every single region they looked at. Koschmann called that unexpected. Nobody had PTEN down as a main driver of this thing. So they went and checked a national database of pediatric tumors, and PTEN turned up in as many as 5% of DIPG cases. PTEN is a gene doctors already go after in breast cancer and in prostate cancer. "If we find it, it's something we can hopefully target with precision therapy," Koschmann said. It is in the literature now. A five year old boy is a paper in a journal called npj Precision Oncology. And since his story got around, the doctors there say more families have started asking about donating. In 2018, thirty million dollars in gifts opened the Chad Carr Pediatric Brain Tumor Center at the University of Michigan. It pulls together pediatrics, neurosurgery, radiation oncology, genetics, pathology, engineering and public health. It was announced at the family foundation's gala, and thousands of people around the country had chipped in to get it there. "This is a monumental milestone in our mission to conquer pediatric brain cancer," said Dr. Valerie Opipari, who chairs pediatrics at Mott Children's Hospital. "We want to see a day when no family will ever have to suffer this kind of heartbreak," Tammi said. "This is Chad's legacy." THIS MORNING, College GameDay ran a feature on his older brother. CJ Carr wears 13. Tonight the number one team in the country comes to South Bend to play him. Chad never saw any of it. His tumor is still being studied.