Glioblastoma research

Dr Steve Pollard

Linking glioblastomas to DNA-protein parcels

Dr Pollard and his group are exploiting the latest genome editing technologies that have opened up new opportunities for understanding the biology of glioblastomas (GBM).

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Dr Paulo Ribeiro

Studying the interaction between genetically different cells in glioblastoma tumour

Dr Ribeiro and his team aim to develop a genetic tool called OncoChrome to study tumour heterogeneity in fruit flies. This tool will be used to tag genes with a fluorescent marker, allowing the team to track cells with the fluorescent genes to look at how tumour heterogeneity influences tumour progression.

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Dr Gregor Hutter

Manipulating the tumour's environment

The environment in which a tumour exists contains several different types of cells. Some of these cell types support tumour growth and promote its spread to other parts of the brain. Microglia are one of the cell types that play an important role in supporting tumour growth. However, researchers have shown that it's possible to manipulate and reprogramme microglia to have an anti-cancer function.

The aim of Dr Hutter's research is to use a combination of drugs to reprogramme microglia to kill glioblastoma cells.

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Professor Colin Watts

Amplifying drug delivery across the blood brain barrier using injectable gels

Professor Colin Watts and his team at the University of Cambridge are testing drug-containing gels as a new delivery method for the treatment of high grade brain tumours.

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Dr Khuloud Al-Jamal

Delivering gene-editing technology to tumour cells across the blood brain barrier

CRISPR/Cas9 is a gene-editing tool that has been hailed as a revolution in genetic engineering. This powerful technology can be used to seek out specific pieces of tumour-causing DNA and cut them to cause tumour cell death. However, one of the major challenges in delivering this tool is overcoming the blood brain barrier (BBB).

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Professor Thomas Wurdinger

Investigating combined drug treatments

This collaboration, being led from Amsterdam, will also involve UK researchers from the University of Cambridge, the Sanger Institute and IOTA Pharmaceuticals. They will be looking at existing drugs in different combinations. They have sophisticated software that will analyse already-licensed drugs to see which ones could work together to treat Glioblastoma (GBM).

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Dr Lucy Stead

Using nanobiopsy to characterise tumour cells

Glioblastomas are the most common, and one of the most aggressive types of brain cancer found in adults.

Standard treatments always result in tumour regrowth. What we don't know is whether glioblastoma cells are naturally resistant to treatment or whether treatments cause changes within the cells that make them resistant.

This project is using advanced technology called nanobiopsy to extract tiny samples from living cells without killing them.

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Dr Adam Waldman

Predicting patient survival - a new method of MRI

Researchers at Imperial College London have developed a new MRI scanning technique that will accurately measure how a tumour is responding to therapy.

The team, led by Dr Adam Waldman, have developed a technique called Diffusion Weighted Imaging (DWI) which measures the properties of water in both the tumour and surrounding brain to detect changes in growth. These changes can be identified at an earlier stage using DWI in comparison with standard MRI.

This technique will now be trialled in newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients across five different brain tumour research centres to confirm whether DWI is a more reliable method than standard MRI.

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Professor Susan Short

Cancer-killing viruses offer fresh hope in the fight against high grade gliomas

Professor Susan Short and her team are studying a non-toxic virus which only 'invades' and kills tumour cells. The viruses can also be primed with anti-cancer drugs to increase their destructive potential.

New methods to deliver drugs to the brain are urgently needed as many drugs are unable to reach the tumour site as they cannot pass through the protective barrier that separates the brain from the bloodstream. Current treatments also cause serious side effects as the do not target the tumour specifically and therefore damage healthy cells.

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Dr Thomas Millner

Understanding the events initiating glioblastoma

In order to treat glioblastomas, it is important to understand the characteristics and the events initiating this tumour type. As part of his clinical research training fellowship, Dr Thomas Millner is researching epigenetic modifications, an important aspect of glioblastoma development.

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Dr Sebastien Serres

Does STAT3 help form a barrier around GBM?

Glioblastomas are highly aggressive tumours for which effective treatment options are lacking, highlighting the urgent need for new therapeutic strategies. Like many other cancers, brain tumours are heavily influenced by their surroundings.

It is therefore important to understand how the tumour cells interact with the healthy brain and respond under certain conditions such as hypoxia (a lack of oxygen in the tissue), as this is likely to reveal new ways to target them.

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Dr Vincenzo D'Angiolella

Targeting glioblastoma cell metabolism

Despite aggressive treatment for glioblastomas, tumour recurrence is inevitable, highlighting the urgent need to understand why these treatments are failing.

This research project will help improve our knowledge the differences between healthy brain tissue and tumour cells. It will help us better understand the underlying mechanisms driving aggressive glioblastomas, and identify ways in which we can disrupt these interactions with drugs to slow tumour growth.

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Professor Colin Watts

Tessa Jowell BRAIN MATRIX

The Tessa Jowell BRAIN-MATRIX is a first-of-its-kind clinical trial that will enable doctors to treat brain tumours with drugs that are more targeted than ever before. We are excited to be investing £2.8 million to set the trial up, and to drive it into the future.

Although the trial is being led from the UK, we expect it to deliver global impact for brain cancer patients.

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Dr Phedias Diamandis

Classifying brain tumours using artificial intelligence

Preliminary research has shown that there is a growing interest in using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve brain tumour diagnosis. However, studies so far have largely focused on relatively niche tasks using pre-defined samples, which limits its use.

To address this, the research team led by Dr Diamandis have developed a brain tumour classification tool by using an emerging form of AI known as convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The aim of this research project is to “train" the classification tool to differentiate the different types of brain tumours.

The classification tool will then allow researchers to predict tumour behaviour and response to treatment.

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Dr Alasdair Rooney

Reducing the effects of fatigue

In researching our quality of life publication, Losing Myself: The Reality of Life with a Brain Tumour, we found that fatigue was a factor in two out of every 3 people with a brain tumour, and that for 40% of people rated their fatigue as severe. The work by Dr Rooney and his colleagues will aim to address this through an intervention study.

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