Glioblastoma is a swift and aggressive brain cancer, with an average life expectancy of about one year after diagnosis. It's difficult to treat, in part because the cellular makeup of each tumor varies greatly from person to person.
"Because of the heterogeneity of this disease, scientists haven't found good ways of tackling it," said Olivier Gevaert, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical informatics and ofDoctors and scientists also struggle with prognosis, as it can be difficult to parse which cancerous cells are driving each patient's glioblastoma.
"The spatial transcriptomics data allows us to look at these types of tumors in a way that was not possible previously," Gevaert said."But it's currently an expensive technology. It takes a few thousand dollars to generate data for a single patient." For example, the model found that when tumor cells resembling neuron support cells, called astrocytes, clustered together abnormally, patients seemed to have more swift, aggressive cancers. Other studies have found that when astrocytes bunch together they communicate biological signals that drive tumor growth.
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