Brain Tumour News

Many of our supporters contributed to the funding of our five-year Brain Tumour Fellowship which supports Grand Charity Fellow, Dr Nick Henriquez. Dr Henriquez has now been working in the Division of Neuropathology at Queen Square for several months. Here is his report on the research he has been doing during that time.

“The research team have developed a model to test whether neural stem cells can cause brain cancer. These stem cells can self-renew: even in adults, they stay in the brain, divide and produce neurons. We have investigated the possibility that such stem cells can also turn rogue and form a brain tumour. We have tested that possibility experimentally, by turning on growth genes in these stem cells. We found that indeed stem cells can cause brain cancer. Most strikingly, we found that we can predict the type of cancer depending on the type of growth signal we activate. A certain combination of genes (Rb and p53 gene loss) causes PNET, malignant brain tumours similar to medulloblastoma, and another combination ( PTEN and p53 loss) induces gliomas, which are similar to the human glioblastoma, a malignant brain tumour in adults with poor prognosis.

The research focuses on two aspects of the development of these experimental brain tumours... (click for next page)