Title
Identification of epigenetic mechanisms
contributing to glioma drug resistance
Synopsis
Our understanding of cancer treatment has
increased over the years and as a result the
personalized treatments became available. However,
for patients with aggressive brain tumors,
glioblastomas, the prognosis has not changed much
and the average survival is still shorter than 15
months. This is associated with the high
resistance of the tumor to the
treatment. Systematic analyses confirmed that the
treatment resistance is associated with the
glioblastoma cellular heterogeneity. The presence
of the non-differentiated cell subpopulation
called ‘cancer stem cells’ is one of the major
obstacles in a successful therapy. Although it was
shown that epigenetic regulation is crucial for
maintenance of a non-differentiated state, up to
date, there is no publicly available data on
association of glioblastoma stem-like cells
chromatin characteristics with the self-renewal
and drug resistance. We hypothesize that a
chromatin state regulating ’stemness’ of tumor
cells will extend understanding of brain tumor
pathobiology and trigger development of new
therapeutic approaches. We propose a comprehensive
epigenetic analysis of the glioblastoma stem-like
cells which may contribute to the treatment
resistance. The main goal of this project
is to provide original and important contribution to understanding the epigenetic mechanisms in glioma stem-like cells underlying glioma recurrence and drug resistance. This will be achieved by an innovative approach combining computational and statistical methods with resources provided by precisely designed experiments and data available through public repositories. Direct analysis of the chromatin landscape in glioblastoma stem-like cells will provide insights into specific epigenetic regulatory networks involved in the glioblastoma recurrence and drug resistance.
Results
Work in progress.
Data
Coming soon.
Funding
This project has received funding from the European
Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation
programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant
agreement No 665778. The funding was granted within
the POLONEZ program from the National Science Centre
in Poland (2016/23/P/NZ2/04111).