Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown for the first time that severe brain cancers integrate into the brain’s wiring.
Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown for the first time that severe brain cancers integrate into the brain’s wiring.
The tumors, called high-grade gliomas, form synapses that hijack electrical signals from healthy nerve cells to drive their own growth. Experiments demonstrated that interrupting these signals with an existing anti-epilepsy drug greatly reduced the cancers’ growth in human tumors in mice, providing the first evidence for a possible new way to treat gliomas.
A paper describing the findings was published online Sept. 18 in Nature.
“One of the most lethal aspects of high-grade gliomas is that the cancer cells diffusely invade normal brain tissue so that the tumor and the healthy brain tissue are knitted together,” said senior author Michelle Monje, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences. The discovery helps explain why gliomas are so intractable, she added. “This is such an insidious group of tumors. They’re actually integrating into the brain.”
Read more at Stanford University
Image by Colin Behrens from Pixabay
