2024 Seed Grant
Toshiro Hara, Ph.D.
University of Michigan
Brain cancer is like an unwanted guest that sneaks into a healthy brain. Doctors can usually get rid of a lot of the cancer with surgery, but it gets really hard when the cancer mixes with normal brain areas. This sneaky move by the cancer is called invasion. The problem is that these tiny cancer cells are so small and tricky that even our best medical scanners can’t spot them. lt’s like the cancer is playing a game of hide-and-seek in the patient’s brain and managing to stay away from the surgeon’s tools.
We know sorne of the paths the cancer takes to invade, but we don’t understand why it chooses certain trails or how it moves so easily. So, what we did was take a super close-up look at how brain cancer cells behave using a special tool called single-cell RNA sequencing. This is a way to see exactly what’s going on inside individual cells. Our first look tells us that brain cancer cells are like masters of disguise-they can look a lot like normal brain cells, especially when they are hiding among them. And it seems they might even be ‘talking’ to the normal cells around them.
We’re going to dive deep into how these cancer cells chat with healthy brain cells and what special instructions, or genes, they use to travel so well. We believe figuring this out could put the brakes on cancer’s sneaky ways. lt could lead to new treatments that help doctors catch all the cancer, not just bits of it, making treatment much more effective.
