Every week, Harvard Medical School neuro-oncologist Annie Hsieh treats patients with gliomas - the most common type of brain cancer, including the deadliest, glioblastoma.
- By STEPHANIE DUTCHEN
After Hsieh's neurosurgeon colleagues remove a glioma surgically, it often looks like none of the cancer is left behind, she says. Radiation and other treatments may follow. Yet gliomas tend to come back, not just at the original site but in distant parts of the brain, threatening neurological harm and, in some cases, death.
What's happening in the brain that encourages these tumors to regrow there - while only rarely appearing in other parts of the body - has stumped scientists for decades and made gliomas one of the hardest-to-treat cancers. It's a question that physician-scientist Hsieh has long wanted to answer.
Now, she and HMS collaborators have filled in a piece of the puzzle by providing the first look at the types of neurons in the brain that connect to gliomas. Findings are reported Dec. 4 in PNAS.
Profiling the identities and properties of such glioma-innervating neurons in mice provides new insights into what drives the cancers' formation and spread in the brain and how researchers might develop new treatment strategies to stop them from coming back.
