Using Mini-Brain Models to Study
Glioblastoma Treatment Responses
Fast facts
- Title: Glioma Brain Organoid Models of Glioblastoma Treatment Response
- Lead Researcher: Dr Lucy Stead
- Where: University of Leeds
- When: September 2024 – August 2026
- Cost: £150,000 over 2 years
- Research type: Glioblastoma (High grade), Adult, Academic
- Grant round: Expanding Theories
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common aggressive brain tumour in adults. The prognosis for patients with a GBM is poor due to several factors including tumour recurrence, lack of effective treatments, poor responses to existing treatment, and suppression of the immune system.
What is it?
Dr Lucy Stead and her team are looking at why GBM tumours become resistant to treatment when they regrow after surgery. GBM is the most common high grade tumour in adults, and carries a very poor prognosis. Patients will undergo surgery to remove as much of the tumour as possible, before receiving chemotherapy and radiotherapy to try and kill the remaining cancer cells. However, some of these remaining cells somehow become resistant to therapy, meaning that the tumour grows back, and is untreatable.
The team have discovered two ways that these tumour cells become treatment resistant, allowing them to grow back. They hope that these two methods of resisting treatment could be overcome with new drugs. To be able to test these drugs, the team first need to develop new pre-clinical models of GBM in the lab. They want to make sure these models really represent what we see in human GBM tumours. Their project focuses on growing miniature brains called brain organoids, and adding tumour cells to create new models. These mini-brain models are very complex, and have features like immune cells that we see in patient tumours.
The team want to investigate whether these mini-brains show the same two ways of treatment resistance that is seen in patients.
Why is it important?
Not much is currently known about how and why GBM tumours are able to recur. It is hoped that the findings from this work will provide important information about this type of GBM model and will be able to inform future experiments testing new drugs to try and combat GBM regrowth after surgery
Dr Lucy Stead
These tumours adapt and survive treatment in what we believe are two different ways. What we now need to do, is to try and understand this in experimental models, so that we can really pinpoint why they’re reacting in these two different ways and whether or not that means we
should be splitting patients into two groups and giving different types of
drugs.
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In this section
Dr Lucy Stead
She is a computational cancer biologist interested in the use of high-throughput sequencing to characterise brain tumour genomes and transcriptomes, and the integrated analysis of datasets to further understand the development and progression of brain cancer. Her research focuses on inspecting genomic and transcriptomic heterogeneity present within brain tumours and across stages of brain cancer development and progression.