Our lab has worked for several years to create a bank of patient-derived cultures and xenografts from neurosurgical specimens.
We have developed a bank of over 45 patient-derived neurosphere cultures from adult glioblastoma and pediatric high-grade gliomas for in vivo and in vitro research on tumor stem cell biology, tumor cell invasion, and tumor genomics. These have formed the basis of all of our ongoing research projects on pre-clinical therapeutics. We are also using these patient-derived cultures to create xenograft models and human brain organoid models for epigenomics and single cell RNA-seq profiling experiments designed to assess the mechanism of action of therapeutic agents under study in our lab.
An excellent example of our work in this area is our ongoing research on targeting the YAP and TAZ transcription factors in glioblastomas:
Vigneswaran, K., N.B. Boyd, S. Lallani, S.-Y. Oh, A. Boucher, S. Neill, J.J. Olson, R.D. Read. 2020. YAP/TAZ transcription factors create therapeutic vulnerability to verteporfin in EGFR mutant glioblastoma. Clinical Cancer Research. Nov 10;clincanres.0018.2020.doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-20-0018.
For a broad discussion of studies on patient-derived materials see our recent review article:
Read, R.D., Z.M. Tapp, P. Rajappa, D. Hambardzumyan. Glioblastoma microenvironment-from biology to therapy. Genes and Development. 2024 Jun 25;38(9-10):360-379. doi: 10.1101/gad.351427.123.
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