Great news and we are happy to advise the Lundbeck Foundation has given a large grant for brain cancer research

Professor Bjarne Winther Kristensen hopes to get closer to a tailored treatment for patients with a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer.

With a grant of DKK 10 million from the Lundbeck Foundation, Professor Bjarne Winther Kristensen from the Bartholin Institute at the Department of Pathology will research the most frequent and aggressive form of brain cancer, glioblastoma, in order to find new possibilities for diagnosis and treatment.  The new research project will run over the next four years.  

– Every year approximately 15,000 patients in the EU are diagnosed with glioblastoma, which is among the cancers with the worst prognosis. There is therefore a very great need for new treatments for that group of patients, says Bjarne Winther Kristensen.

Today, most patients with this type of brain cancer receive the same radiotherapy and chemotherapy after the cancerous tumor is surgically removed. But Bjarne Winther Kristensen hopes that with the results that come out of the research project, it will be possible to better target the future treatment to the individual patient. 

– A glioblastoma brain tumor is today categorized as one specific form of cancer. But in our research, we hope to be able to divide the cancer into different subtypes. We believe that there are several different subtypes because the glioblastoma cancer tissue from different patients looks very different under the microscope, says Bjarne Winther Kristensen.

Hope to be able to tailor the treatment: The difference in the patients’ brain tumors, which the research project will investigate, is the amount and type of cells surrounding the cancer cells. They can be decisive for which treatment the patient benefits from the most. 

– Via a new and ground-breaking technique, we can obtain information about the thousands of other cells that lie around the cancer cells at the same time as we gain precise knowledge of where cells and neighboring cells lie in relation to each other. This allows us to decode how the cells communicate with and influence each other.  It could be, for example, that there are many immune cells that mix with the cancer cells in a patient. This can have an impact on how the patient responds to both new and known treatments. We know this from experiments in the laboratory with living cancer cells taken from the patients. Somewhat unexpectedly, this also appears to affect the effect of standard chemotherapy, which appears to work less well in patients with high numbers of certain immune cells (macrophages). By preventing this interaction between immune cells and cancer cells, the effect of standard chemotherapy could potentially be improved. If we are able make findings of the cells infiltrating the cancerous tumor, we hope to be able to tailor the treatment to the patients better, explains Bjarne Winther Kristensen.

As part of the project, the most promising treatment strategies will be tested in the laboratory in models based on cancer cells from patients with glioblastoma, so that they can benefit the patients as soon as possible.  

– We are collaborating with the oncologists at Rigshospitalet and from the start of our experiments in the laboratory, we can focus on the treatment strategies are most likely to be transferred directly to the patients. 
With the grant from the Lundbeck Foundation, we really hope to be able to make a difference, says Bjarne Winther Kristensen.