SUMMARY

Our group focuses on the study of brain tumors, primary tumors and brain metastasis. These are some of the most aggressive cancers and advancing progress within the field is consequently critical. Our studies are largely based on research into patient-derived tumors. Since 2005, we have been generating animal models that recapitulate the tumor of the patient at genomic and gene expression levels. We inoculate the patient-derived tumor cells into the brain of immunocompromised mice and they generate tumors with the same characteristics as the original human tumor, which we can then monitor by MRI. This mouse model for human glioma is of major interest in the study of the molecular mechanisms involved in cancer as well as the evaluation of the efficacy of pharmacological compounds.

Our efforts have led to several publications in 2014. Specifically we would like to highlight the publication Rodon L. et al. Cancer Discovery 2014, reporting on molecular mechanisms involved in the aberrantly high levels of TGFb2 present in some glioblastoma. We found that a malignant autocrine loop occurs in glioblastoma where TGFb2 induces TGFb2 which in turn induces more TGFb2. The work identified CREB as a therapeutic target against glioblastoma and a biomarker to predict the response to anti-TGFb agents since CREB is the transcription factor involved in the generation of the autocrine loop.

PUBLICATIONS