George Kumar, Senior Director at AstraZeneca, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Tumour Network Mapping Reveals a Hidden Circuit Driving Diffuse Midline Glioma.
Diffuse midline gliomas (DMGs) are among the most devastating brain tumours in children – and a new study suggests they may be surviving by hijacking the brain’s own neural circuitry.
Researchers used a technique called tumour network mapping to chart how DMGs connect to the wider brain in living patients. They identified a conserved network of functional connections shared across pontine and thalamic DMGs – and found that a tumour’s degree of integration into this network was independently predictive of patient survival across two external cohorts.
The findings go further: tumour growth followed network-specific trajectories, and peak neurometabolic changes within the network aligned with the age at which DMG most commonly strikes. Single-nucleus RNA sequencing confirmed that high-connectivity tumour regions are enriched for synaptic gene expression – consistent with active neuron-to-glioma communication.
Most strikingly, patients who underwent incidental surgical resection of high-connectivity thalamic DMG tissue showed a significant survival advantage – a clinical signal pointing to the therapeutic relevance of network disruption.
This work reframes DMG as a disease not just of a tumour mass, but of a tumour embedded within – and exploiting – healthy brain circuits. It opens a new axis for intervention: not just targeting the cancer cell, but severing the connections that feed it.”
Title: A prognostic human brain network for diffuse midline glioma
Authors: Jai Sidpra, Valentina Lind, Alexander L. Cohen, Frederic Schaper, Thomas Stone, Yura Grabovska, Asthik Biswas, Sniya Sudhakar, Francisco Sepulveda, Bruno Peres, Greta Veronese, Cristina Alemán-Charlet, Olumide Ogunbiyi, Kiarash Shamardani, Jiaqi Zhao, Alberto Castro Palacin, Gillian Miller, Raffaella Opipari, Enrico De Vita, Deborah Ridout, Suely Ferraciolli, Leandro Lucato, Jernej Avsenik, Eleonora Piccirilli, Darren Hargrave
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