The first steps towards developing a robust on-chip model of glioma outgrowth into healthy tissue have been outlined in an article published in the journal In vitro models.

These tumours, the most common primary brain tumour in adults, require precise and careful surgeries to remove, and often cannot be fully removed, leading to a rate of 95% recurrence.

Current clinical measurement techniques don’t adequately capture the behaviour of cells during this time of recurrence. To address this lack of knowledge, Dr Chris Chapman and his team have developed an on-chip in vitro platform to assess glioblastoma interactions with healthy neural cells in engineered microchannels.

They found that glioma cells spread more when they were grown together with healthy neural cells (co-culture) than when they were grown alone (monoculture). They also noticed differences in proteins implicated in tumour aggressiveness and neuroinflammation in the co-cultured cells compared to the monoculture, supporting previously observed evidence that glioma cells alter the neural environment to support infiltration into healthy tissue.

They believe that their on-chip model will allow for better understanding of how glioma cells interact with and invade healthy tissue, with the potential to improve the development of techniques to measure and treat tumour regrowth, leading to much needed advances in the treatment of tumour recurrence.

This is the first research paper from Dr Chris Chapman’s group, and the research was primarily led by Joshua Daoud who started his PhD this year.

Dr Chapman said “It has been great to work with the Centre for Predictive In Vitro Models at Queen Mary to develop a neural organ-chip system for our work with glioblastoma. I am excited to see how this work develops as we increase complexity of the model and push towards relevance for patient specific disease states.”