Posted on 03/07/2023 9:05:00 AM PST by ConservativeMind
New research pinpoints a key cause of metastasis from an aggressive form of brain cancer in children and provides a potential new therapy for treating these tumors.
Physician-scientists discovered that medulloblastomas hijack a skill that normal brain cells use during their early development and then manipulate it to help tumors spread.
"Children with medulloblastomas that have not yet metastasized may have a high likelihood of long-term survival, but if those tumors have spread, the survival rate is significantly reduced," said Baoli. "Longstanding challenges that we face in the field include understanding how tumors are able to spread and how we can stop tumor metastasis."
Brain tumors are the leading cause of cancer death in children. The most common malignant children's brain tumor is medulloblastoma, which form in a region of the brain called the cerebellum, with about 500 new cases diagnosed in the U.S. each year. Medulloblastomas are commonly treated with surgery followed by radiation and chemotherapy, but in up to one-third of children, the tumor will metastasize, or spread out to tissues and organs beyond where the tumor originated.
Hu and his team found that levels of a gene called SMARCD3 were significantly higher in metastatic tumors compared to those that had not spread.
They also showed that SMARCD3 hijacks neurodevelopmental signaling pathways to promote tumor cell spreading. These pathways are used by healthy brain cells during early cerebellar development and are shut off when the cerebellum matures.
Next, the researchers targeted these pathways with a drug called dasatinib, which has been approved to treat leukemia in the clinic. In a mouse model of medullobastoma, dasatinib preferentially killed metastatic tumors with higher levels of SMARCD3, suggesting that the drug causes little or no harm to normal brain cells and could be safe for treating patients with medulloblastoma metastasis.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
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