Alvaro Alvarado, Assistant Project Scientist, Kornblum Lab, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California Los Angeles
Despite efforts to gain a deeper understanding of its molecular architecture, glioblastoma (GBM) remains uniformly fatal. While recent advances in single cell technology and genomebased subtyping have revealed that GBMs may be parsed into several molecularly distinct categories, this insight has yielded little progress towards extending patient survival. We have developed two separate projects to resolve tumoral heterogeneity: first, we interrogated tumor samples using a pathway-based approach to generate clusters based on overall patterns of enrichment. These data underscore the importance of cell cycle signatures in tumor biology. Second, we created a 28-marker mass cytometry panel composed of signaling markers and lineage markers that have been associated with GBM or cancer stem cells. These studies reveal pathways that are preferentially use by different tumor cells that interact with distinct immune populations. Both studies have the overarching goal of establishing therapeutic efforts to extend patient survival.
