UCC researcher makes breakthrough in treatment of aggressive brain tumour

“The promise it holds for the future is just incredible,” she said of her initial findings. “A diagnosis with glioblastoma is cruel, any brain tumour at all robs you of yourself.” 

She treated tumour samples donated by 10 patients with retinoic acid, which controls growth pathways in cells. 

"What was interesting was even though they would have originally all been diagnosed with grade 4 glioblastoma, the tumours all responded slightly differently," she said, adding: "This could be an indication as to why the same treatment approach doesn’t work equally in every patient.” 

Her work is funded through a Musgrave PhD scholarship in association with Breakthrough Cancer Research. 

“My project is actually turning it into creating a personalised treatment,” she said.

“The best way I describe it is that retinoic acid acts like a key in a receptor so like a key into a lock. It can slow down the growth of that cell, but I found some that actually speed up the growth, found some that do nothing and I found some that slow the growth, depending on the tumour.” 

The Royal College of Surgeons Ireland precision cancer medicine group is also researching malignant glioblastoma.

“This is a fatal disease, and only about 4% of patients that have their diagnosis of glioblastoma survive past five years,” group head Professor Annette Byrne said. 

“Of the 290 malignant brain tumours diagnosed annually in Ireland, about 70% of these are glioblastoma.” 

They recently published a paper identifying three tumour sub-types.

“As the understanding of the disease improves, we understand that each patient’s tumour tends to be a little bit different,” she said.

“In particular, what we understand now is that the tumour cells are embedded in what we call the tumour microenvironment. So this is the neighbourhood in which they exist in the brain.” 

Their objective is to investigate whether patients can be treated based on those sub-types.

“One of the very interesting and encouraging pieces of data from our research is that our early research suggests there is a small group of these patients who may respond to immunotherapy,” she said.

She explained: “If we can bring that into the clinic, that would be a major advance because it would open up immunotherapy to these patients. It would be a third of those patients.” 

This is being modelled with the National Centre for Neurosurgery, Beaumont Hospital. 

“The idea would be in a period of two to three years to be able to offer new clinical trials for Irish glioblastoma patients, based on this tumour sub-type approach,” Prof Byrne said.

Brain Tumour Ireland and RCSI host a talk on Wednesday for Brain Tumour Awareness Week. Details at BrainTumourIreland.com