Researchers at the University of North Carolina are working to perfect stem-cell research after a discovery made regarding glioblastoma, a cancerous brain tumor.

The research team from the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy has found that surgically removing these brain tumors causes cancer to grow 75 percent faster than before surgery.

Treatment of glioblastoma is typically a combination of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation but varies from patient to patient. Because of the obtrusive nature of brain tumors, glioblastoma can not be fully removed during surgery, leaving a portion of the tumor behind.

The assistant professor in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy who led the research, Shawn Hingtgen says that the remaing glioblastoma in the brain after surgery is fundamentally different from the original brain tumor.

“The process of removing the tumor speeds up the cancer such that we have to rethink of how to treat the disease differently after the surgery,” Hingtgen said.

Neuropathologist and associate professor at the UNC School of Medicine, Ryan Miller, says that current drugs are developed to treat large, solid tumors and do not accurately work on the residual brain tumors.

Hingtgen and his research team are working on a new stem-cell treatment that can hunt down and kill the cancer cells that are left behind when a brain tumor is surgically removed.

To more accurately test new treatment, a graduate student working in Hingten’s laboratory, Onyi Okolie, has developed a new mouse model of a brain with glioblastoma after surgery.

To do this, Okolie implants a tumor into the mouse’s brain and allows it to grow until it is comparable to when a human would begin having symptoms from the tumor such as headache, seizures or an altered mental state.

At that point 90 percent of the tumor is surgically removed from the mouse, which causes astrocytes, star-shaped glial cells, to secrete chemicals that trigger the remaning cancer cells to move and grow 75 percent faster than before.

The new model will help researchers better understand the effect of surgery on glioblastoma and could potencially lead to new therapeutic targets that will improve post-operative care.

The new findings are published in the journal Neuro-Oncology.

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