Study Reveals How Brain Cancer Evolves in Response to Treatment

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown how brain tumors evolve in response to therapy, helping describe how such cancers develop treatment resistance that leads to the high mortality rate characteristic of this cancer. Only 5% of patients survive five years after diagnosis with the most aggressive brain cancers.

Published in the journal Cancer Cell, the international study is co-led by Li Ding, PhD, the David English Smith Distinguished Professor of Medicine, and Milan G. Chheda, MD, an associate professor of medicine, and is part of the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Ding and Chheda are members of Siteman Cancer Center, based at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the School of Medicine.

The researchers analyzed glioblastoma and high-grade astrocytoma tumors from 200 patients to identify mutated proteins and other molecules involved in making these tumors so resistant to treatment. For a subset of the tumors, the researchers were able to study how the proteins changed when the tumors returned or continued growing after treatment. They found many different genetic alterations that converged on some common cellular events affecting protein interactions and metabolism in the tumors. Notably, they identified a central role for a gene called PTPN11, which could serve as a target for possible future treatments.