Brain Tumor Initiative and Tissue Sampling

Background

About 13,000 people each year are diagnosed with glioblastoma (GBM), the deadliest of solid cancers, in Europe. Brain cancer patients suffer from poor quality of life and grim survival. Despite maximal clinical efforts, these patients live in average 2 years after being diagnosed.

Over the past two centuries, only a little progress has been made in the clinical management of this deadly disease, mostly due to complex and understudied biology. After receiving standard treatment, which consists of chemo-irradiation, brain cancer cells often develop resistance and patients undergo so-called recurrence, at which the aggressive and fast growing tumor kills the patient within few months. Brain cancer is characteristic by its invasive growth, where individual tumor cells spread throughout the normal brain tissue, making it impossible for surgeons to remove the whole tumor without damaging the normal brain.

Purpose

Several studies have shown that the cancer model choice is crucial for the translation of research findings into clinical practice. For years, scientists have used commercially available stable cells lines for testing new drugs. It has been shown, that these cell lines do not look and behave the same way as patients’ tumors, prompting the development of primary spheroid culture models and xenograft models in immunocompromised mice.

The Brain Tumor Initiative (joined research effort between Brain Tumor Biology laboratory, Department of Neurosurgery and Phase I Unit at Rigshospital) is a first step towards an individualized treatment program for GBM and thereby has the potential to improve GBM patient survival.

Our mission is to establish a platform whereby GMB patient tumors will be dissociated and spheroid cultures established for optimal growth and recapitulation of physiological conditions.

Tumor tissue collected will be:

• snap-frozen in liquid nitrogen (N2) for the purpose of personalized medicine project (headed by Prof. U. Lassen) and other follow-up/validation studies
• after propagation in vitro and in vivo, sufficient material is available to perform above mentioned mechanistic studies as well as new drug testing in mouse xenograft models.