About this Project
Glioblastoma brain cancer remains incurable, which is largely due to the fact that the tumor cells do not stay put in the tumor. They aggressively invade the surrounding brain tissue, so when a neurosurgeon removes the tumor tissue that they can see, they invariably fail to remove those invading cells, so the tumor grows back and kills the patient within about a year on average. To make matters worse, there are glioblastoma 'stem cells' (GSCs) within the tumor that are resistant to radiation and chemotherapy and that are believed to be responsible for regrowth of the tumor after treatment.
Students in the laboratory of UD Professor Deni Galileo are trying to better understand the behavior of those invading GSCs and the factors that facilitate their aggressive invasion into brain tissue. Brain cancer research in the Galileo lab has been carried out by multiple undergraduate senior thesis students as well as graduate students.
Last year, Galileo and his students published a scientific journal article on using the chick embryo brain for brain cancer research to the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). This allowed them to describe in detail how to use the chick brain to study human brain cancer so that others could make use of this novel system. The article entitled "Using the chick embryo brain as a model for in vivo and ex vivo analyses of human glioblastoma cell behavior'' includes multiple figures of results and videos detailing the procedures. The Galileo lab is the only lab in the world right now that uses the chick embryo brain for brain cancer research.
Over the last several years, research in the Galileo Lab has been funded primarily by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Lisa Dean Moseley Foundation, headquartered in Wilmington, DE. The objective of this project is to fund undergraduate student research in the Galileo lab that culminates in published research articles aimed at better understanding and treating glioblastoma brain cancer. Biomedical granting agencies that fund brain cancer research often are not interested in involving undergraduate students, and this provides a unique opportunity to fund undergraduates doing medical research on brain cancer.
Donor Impact: How your support makes a difference!
Receiving funding through this project would greatly facilitate the ability of undergraduate students to be involved in brain cancer research. Since coming to UD, Galileo has trained 28 undergraduate senior thesis students, including the two currently in his lab, as well as multiple Masters and PhD students. Most of these undergraduate mentees go on to medical school, and it is important that they have participated in real research and have learned to appreciate what researchers do, even if they do not participate in research after they graduate from medical school. But many of these students do participate in research during and after graduating from medical school, and some become physician scientists. Thank you for supporting this important research and our student researchers.
