At age 12, Lola Muñoz made a daunting decision: She chose to enter a clinical trial to test a new combination of chemotherapy drugs.



Lola had been diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), a rare and aggressive type of brain tumor in children that affects part of the brainstem. She knew the chances that the trial would help her condition were slim. She knew that the treatments would make her very sick. But she did it anyway.

“I wasn't doing it for me. I was doing it for all the other kids who suffered,” she told photojournalist Moriah Ratner about a month after starting the trial. Ratner spent almost a year and a half with Lola and