Abstract
GBM is the most aggressive and most common primary brain tumour in adults and is uniformly fatal, with a poor median survival time of 15 months. Standard of care for GBM consist of surgical resection followed by radio and chemotherapy, despite this resistance to treatment almost always occurs making recurrence inevitable. Failure of the current standard of care has been partly attributed to a special sub-population, the glioma stem cells (GSCs), which initiate and drive tumour growth. Treatment can not be successful unless all GSCs are eliminated. However, GSCs are known to be highly resistant to radiotherapy. New treatments that specifically target GSCs could have a potentially large benefit. BMP4 is known to induce differentiation of GSCs towards a less malignant, astrocytic-like lineage. Furthermore, new delivery systems (non-virally engineered adipose mesenchymal cells) provide a potential mechanism by which BMP4 could be successfully administered to reverse the GSC state and increase radio-sensitivity in patients. We develop a data-driven mechanistic mathematical model to create digital twins from patient data on which we perform in silico clinical trials to identify patient specific optimised treatment strategies.
Slides
Citation
@misc{harbour2024,
author = {Harbour, Nicholas and Curtin, Lee and Hubbard, Matthew and
Swanson, Kristin and Owen, Markus},
title = {Virtual Clinical Trials of {BMP4-induced} Differentiation
Therapy Identify Strategies for Combination with Radiation Therapy
for Glioblastoma Patients},
date = {2024-02-18},
langid = {en}
}