Cancer cell migration research offers hope for new treatment of brain tumors

University of Huddersfield scientist, Dr. Anke Brüning-Richardson, has published promising findings from the past seven years of research into a new approach for the treatment of highly aggressive brain tumors.

Dr. Brüning-Richardson, who is a Senior Lecturer in Biomedicine within the Department of Physical and Life Sciences, is the lead on the collaborative research effort which sees her working alongside long-time research partner Dr. Sean Lawler of Brown University, in the United States, as well as the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham, Linz University in Austria and the Institute of Cancer Research in the U.K.

Currently, the standard treatment options for brain tumors are limited to surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy and even with this combined treatment an aggressive type of brain tumor, known as glioblastoma, will eventually grow back.

Dr. Brüning-Richardson's research is investigating using new drug combinations to prevent or reduce the migration of cancer cells that remain after surgery.

The research team hopes to prevent any remaining cancer cells from migrating to other parts of the brain and regrowing, thereby improving the survival chances of patients.

By following this potential new treatment with cytotoxic drugs—such as chemotherapy—the team hopes this will be a game-changing drug discovery for brain tumor treatment that is needed. They are already seeing promising results with candidate drugs which are being tested on mini tumors at Dr. Brüning-Richardson's laboratory at the University.

Some of the recent findings are published in Cell Reports and coincide with Brain Tumor Awareness Month, which takes place in March.

"My approach is to target the invasive ability of cancer cells. If we could at the time of surgery add a drug to the surgical wound that will actually immobilize any remaining cancer cells, then they are much more targetable with conventional treatment because they're still in their original place. They can be located by MRI scans and then targeted more efficiently with conventional chemo or radiotherapy," says Brüning-Richardson.

"For the last 14 years, I've been investigating and screening novel drugs that will do just that. I've been collaborating with Dr. Sean Lawler, initially at Leeds where we both worked, and now at Brown University where he currently works. He discovered this group of compounds which do exactly what we are looking for—and when you give these drugs to the cancer cells that we grow in the lab, the cells become immobilized."

"Our current research findings in Cell Reports explain how these drugs work and as part of this work we have also uncovered proteins in the cancer cells that allow cells to change morphology in preparation for cell migration/invasion. We can now investigate these proteins further either as potential targets for new drugs or as indicators (or biomarkers) for assessing how quickly a tumor will return.

"In my lab, I have been making 3D models of cancer cells—these are mini tumors from real cancer cells embedded in a matrix that mimics the surroundings of the brain to which we can apply drugs and monitor their effect on migration. Not only is this a reproducible, scalable system allowing the large-scale screening of many drug candidates at once, but it is also working toward animal-free pre-clinical cancer drug selection."