[Sep. 22] Joint Invited Speaker Seminar Series for Future Medicine

July 20 2022

The "Joint Invited Speaker Seminar Series for Future Medicine" will be co-hosted by Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) GSMSE and International Research Center for Medical Sciences (IRCMS). It will run from May 2022 to September 2022, with lecture given by scientists who are affiliated with IRCMS or in collaboration with reseachers at IRCMS. The lectures will be given three times a month, in English, and by leading scientists in the relevant research field.

Date : September 22nd (Thu)

Time : 17:00 (JST)

Speaker : Dr. Simona Parrinello
                Professor, University College London

Title :Glioblastoma invasion hijacks brain development and regeneration

Abstract:

Glioblastoma (GBM) are common and devastating primary brain tumours driven by glioma stem-like cells. GBM have extremely short survival times and are almost universally lethal due to their marked therapeutic resistance. Current knowledge of GBM biology originates almost exclusively from analysis of the tumour bulk collected during surgical de-bulking. However, tissue from this tumour region is of little clinical interest as it is resected. Instead, lethal recurrence originates from poorly characterised residual invasive cells at the tumour margin. Importantly, the microenvironments of the GBM bulk and margin are dramatically different, suggesting that tumour cell fate may differ between these regions and thus therapeutic vulnerabilities identified in the bulk may not extend to the margin. I will discuss recent work from my laboratory in which we developed novel disease-relevant somatic GBM mouse models to analyse the biology of margin cells. This work revealed that the GBM margin has a distinct biology, including differences in tumour hierarchies and immune microenvironment. I will further discuss our findings that the GBM margin is highly heterogenous and brain-region dependent and how injury programmes play a key role in shaping this heterogeneity.

This seminar will be held via Zoom.
Please register at the link below if you would like to participate.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSenZyyWw2h4XA4GhJUwaoMbZb95CNstqAFWcWkHiN451rDwMg/viewform?usp=sf_link