When Georgia Tech bioengineer A. Fatih Sarioglu gave a seminar at Emory Winship Cancer Institute describing a microfluidic device that he had developed, Dr. Tobey MacDonald’s ears perked up.
The device allowed Sarioglu to capture circulating cancer cells in the blood of adult patients with a variety of cancers, MacDonald said.
“I quickly asked him whether this could be applicable to brain tumors,” MacDonald said.
MacDonald’s team of researchers at the Winship Cancer Institute had been studying childhood brain tumors in mice, and were able to detect very rare circulating cancer cells. Based on that evidence, MacDonald applied for a grant from the V Foundation to study children with medulloblastoma brain cancer, which he has been doing over the last five to seven years.
A new grant from the Baldrick Foundation will allow his team to monitor treatment in real time of the most difficult brain tumors in children using blood tests.
Despite attempts with either radiation or chemotherapy, invariably these tumors come back and take the life of the child, MacDonald said.
But we don’t know for a long time whether the treatments are working or not, because we don’t have a robust tool to tell us, ‘Are the cells being killed? Are they surviving? Are they growing?’ MacDonald said. “And that’s because we can’t keep going back to the brain to do a biopsy to see what’s happening inside.”
MRI imaging can take months, even a year or two, before doctors realize the tumor is growing and the treatment is not working.
“We give our treatment and then the only other information snapshot we have of what happens to this tumor is, unfortunately, an autopsy,” MacDonald said. “So you’ve got a black box between diagnosis and death of what evolved over time and that really hampers our ability to discover and implement new treatments that could be curative.”
By studying the cells in the blood, researchers know early on, within the first weeks of treatment, if it is effectively killing the tumor cells that are left behind or whether tumor cells resistant.
Now, the team is expanding its study to all types of brain tumors, including diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), the most deadly brain tumor for which there is no cure.
Children with a DIPG diagnosis are treated with radiation that may stabilize the tumor for six months to a year, but while symptoms may get a little better, eventually this tumor will grow and the child will not survive.
“When we give a treatment, we’d like to test these cells [in the blood] at the beginning, before any treatments given,” he said. “Then we’re going to sample the blood after a treatment is given to determine what patterns of resistance to the treatment emerge in these cells to develop new therapies based on that information.”
The goal is to create new therapies that will target that resistance and provide a cure in the end, he said.
This article comes to Now Habersham in partnership with GPB News
