Glioblastomas are still incurable brain tumors, due in part to their particular invasiveness: They spread throughout the brain, and so cannot be removed entirely by surgery. Now, a study in mice published July 31 in Cell has identified a factor that drives this invasiveness, finding that one population of glioblastoma cells behaves like immature neurons, and—stimulated by input from the brain’s own neurons—pioneers the tumor’s spread into new brain regions.
“The study is highly interesting,” says Andreas Bikfalvi, a biomedical researcher at the University of Bordeaux in France who was not involved in this study. “It really contributes to describing, for the first time, that neuronal input is driving invasion in glioblastoma cells.”
In previous work, some of the study’s authors had shown that glioblastoma cells connect with each other via tumor microtubules. The new study’s first author, Varun Venkataramani, a brain tumor researcher at University Hospital Heidelberg and the ...
