Spencer’s research focusses on understanding how glioblastoma cells resist treatment. He’s also trying to find new treatments that can help slow or prevent recurrence.
Our Future Leaders programme, which supports the very best researchers in the brain tumour field, helped fund this work.
Why do glioblastomas grow back?
Spencer’s work in Professor Johanna Joyce’s lab focuses on glioblastomas, the most aggressive brain tumour in adults. He is trying to understand why these tumours grow back after treatment and how we can try to stop this happening.
Standard of care treatment for glioblastoma is surgery to remove the tumour, followed by chemotherapy (usually temozolomide) and radiotherapy. Despite the initial success of these treatments, the tumour almost always grows back.
But why?
Spencer’s research shows that treatment can inadvertently cause scarring in the brain and that tumours often regrow next to these scarred regions.
What is happening in these scarred regions?
This scarring appears to create a protective environment for tumour cells that have not been removed or killed by initial treatment. This allows them to resist treatment and remain dormant for a period of time, until they start growing again. Scarring may also help tumour cells hide from the immune system, which is designed to find and kill cancer cells.
Could new treatments help?
This research, published in Cancer Cell and featured on the front cover of the journal, reveals a potential way to overcome this scarring.
Spencer and his team used cutting-edge technology that they had previously developed to understand the environment around the tumour in unprecedented detail. This helped them to see exactly how the scars form and how they protect the tumour cells from the immune system.
With this knowledge, they were able to combine immunotherapy drugs with drugs that prevent scarring. This significantly reduced scar formation in preclinical models. It not only decreased tumour recurrence in these models, but also improved overall survival.
Although these initial studies were done in preclinical models, they show compelling evidence that the same response to treatment may be happening in patients. This now give clues about potential treatment approaches in the future to treat people facing this devastating disease.
One of the things that is almost constant in cancer treatment is scarring and fibrosis. We often refer to cancers as wounds that don’t heal, precisely because the normal wound healing mechanisms that our bodies use end up helping cancer cells. This study has raised our awareness of exactly how glioblastoma can make use of wound healing, and use scars as a safe haven to ride out treatment. Moreover, we were able to find a way to block this, and dramatically improve response to immunotherapy in mouse models. This gives us a completely new mechanism to target to hopefully slow or stop glioblastoma recurrence in the patient setting.
Dr Spencer Watson – Future Leader
Find out more about this research
Dr Spencer Watson
Spencer is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Lausanne’s Department of Oncology. He is studying the environment around brain tumours to better understand how we can improve treatments.
