StemCell Therapy

The biggest difficulty when treating cancer in the brain is the blood-brain barrier, a group of blood vessels that filter what enters and leaves the brain.

When cancer cells enter the brain, the blood-brain barrier becomes a blood-tumor barrier, which creates another obstacle for effectively getting cancer drugs to the brain.

A team at Purdue has developed an extensive identification of the blood-brain and blood-tumor barriers that interfere in brain metastases of lung cancer, which will provide a guide for developing treatments. The research was published in Oncotarget, a bio-medical journal that primarily publishes research on oncology.

Tiffany Lyle, an assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Science, led the team of scientists. Her work is centered on the pathology of the blood-brain barrier.

Brain metastases occur most frequently in patients diagnosed with breast and lung cancer and melanoma, Lyle said in a Purdue press release. She went on to explain that the metastases have a high survival rate, mainly because the blood-barrier makes it extremely difficult to get medication into the brain tissue.

Brain metastases, also known as secondary brain tumors, develop when cancer cells spread from their point of origin and into the brain. This is occurs in between 10% and 30% of adult cancer cases, according to the Mayo Clinic.

The researchers analyzed blood-brain and blood-tumor barriers in animal models using non-small-cell cancer cells, which make up the majority of lung cancers, and immunofluorescent imaging. They confirmed their results by studying blood-tumor barriers of brain metastases in brain tissue from cadavers.

We wanted to see what changes in the blood-brain barrier were occurring rapidly and which ones were sustained over time, Lyle said. Identifying those changes and pinpointing when they occur during the transition will be critical to developing treatment plant and being able to identify where, and when, cancer cells need to be targeted.

Lyle added that until the teams discovery, the blood-tumor barrier had not been properly identified in lung cancer.

During their analysis, the team observed that one of the changes in the blood-brain barrier to the blood-tumor barrier occurred in the astrocytes, one of the largest cells in the brain that serve a variety of functions. Lyle commented that this discovery alone will serve a key role in the development of future cancer treatment in the brain, as it shows the scientists where and when the brain prevents drugs from entering.

A goal of our research is to meaningfully contribute to the evolving field of personalized medicine and provide patients who have received a devastating diagnosis a sense of home for treatment possibilities, Lyle said.

More here:
Purdue researchers develop map to make getting cancer drugs to the brain easier - Purdue Exponent

This entry was posted on November 13, 2019 at 6:52 am and is filed under Personalized Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |