Thiruvananthapuram: In a new discovery that could bring about a fundamental change in the treatment of cancerous brain tumors, a team of scientists from the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center has found that cancer cells fuse with healthy brain cells. and can cause rapid cognitive loss and death in patients.
A team led by Sarita Krishna, an Indian, found that a commonly used anti-seizure drug was effective in reducing the hyperactivity of tumor cells and inhibiting their growth.

The study is published in the latest issue of the scientific journal “Nature”.

Scientists have found that communication between healthy brain cells and cancer cells can be manipulated to slow or stop tumor growth.

The study noted that the findings could be particularly useful for patients with glioblastoma, considered the most dangerous of adult-onset brain cancers.

A study by Ms. Krishna and fellow scientist Shawn Hervey-Jumper discovered a previously unknown mechanism by which brain tumors hijack and alter brain circuits, causing cognitive decline in glioma patients while recording the brain activity of patients undergoing awake-brain tumor surgery. .

Speaking to PTI, Ms Krishna, from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala and lead author of the paper, said that when patients were given language tasks during awake brain surgery, we saw activity in addition to the commonly known language areas of the brain. The brain regions that the tumor infiltrated were remote from the language brain regions.

This unexpected finding shows that malignant cancer cells can rapidly alter connections in surrounding brain tissue, hastening cognitive decline and shortening survival in patients.

This forced scientists to carry out detailed biological characterization of the engrafted tumor cells using brain organoids (small bundles of neurons derived from human stem cells and mouse models engrafted with human glioblastoma cells).

“These experiments revealed a key role of the protein ‘thrombospondin-1’ in this neuronal hyperactivity and the commonly used anti-seizure drug gabapentin successfully reduced neuronal hyperactivity and inhibited further tumor growth,” it is quoted as saying.

The scientists noted that the discovery could be very useful in developing more effective treatments for a very dangerous disease like glioblastoma.

“Besides this known anti-convulsant activity, this study using mouse models to demonstrate the anti-tumor effect of gabapentin highlights the potential of repurposing this drug to target tumor growth, thereby accelerating therapeutic drug development for patients with malignant glioma,” Sarita said.

Furthermore, he added, the key finding related to hijacking brain circuits by cancer cells could lead to the development of drugs and neuromodulation techniques that can sever neural connections with brain cancer cells to stop tumor growth.

“Non-invasive brain modulation techniques, traditionally used to modulate neural activity in epilepsy and psychiatric disorders, can now be used in clinical trials and tested in brain cancer patients to suppress glioma activity,” Sarita said.