What is it about?
Brain tumors such as glioblastoma multiforme spread into the nearby healthy tissue and are therefore hard to manage. Treatment is difficult and making aspects of the complex process of brain tumor invasion accessible for biomedical research experiments can be an important step towards finding new therapies. We wanted to test whether and how we can advance the modelling of infiltrative brain tumor growth within neural tissue in the laboratory using stem cell-grown ‘mini-brains’ (early-stage cerebral organoids).
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Why is it important?
Studying tumor invasion as it happens in vivo can be both technically-challenging and resource-intense. Developing an ex vivo stem cell-based ‘mini-brain’ approach can help to accelerate the discovery of potential anti-brain tumor agents by allowing for a considerable number of parallel experiments (e.g., in a 96-well microtiter plate format). The experiments can be recorded in real time using live cell imaging (available to many laboratories).
Perspectives
This publication highlights the ability of brain tumor (glioblastoma stem cell-like) cell ‘clumps’ (spheroids) to invade into neural tissue in 3D as compared to non-cancerous adult brain progenitor cells (control). We expect that the development of this assay will make a difference for us in regards with the initial testing of individual anti-tumor and pro-tumor growth conditions, in particular by helping us to distinguish between tumor cell-specific effects and non-successful (i.e., organoid and control brain cell toxicity) experimental outcomes.
Heiko Wurdak
University of Leeds
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Spontaneous Glioblastoma Spheroid Infiltration of Early-Stage Cerebral Organoids Models Brain Tumor Invasion, SLAS DISCOVERY, March 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/2472555218764623.
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