Thanks Caroline!

Thanks Roel!

Thank you for reading and supporting brain cancer research. Our patients need better treatments and it’s up to all of us to figure this out. For more reading, check out a commentary by Sheila Sing www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I am especially grateful for the patients who volunteered for this learning study. Their bravery and generosity while dealing with a new brain tumor diagnosis has generated new knowledge and potential treatments-we will do our best to make these a reality.

I am grateful for my wonderful colleagues who made this work happen and our funders of this and other studies. @damonrunyon.org , the Ivy Foundation, the Mark Foundation, the Sontag Foundation and the NCI.

Many questions remain, but we are now working to bring a serine free diet to our brain cancer patients at the Rogel Cancer Center at the University of Michigan with funding from the NCI and support from industry partners. www.rogelcancercenter.org

After validating these findings, we tried to target them. We blocked environmental serine uptake in mice by eliminating it from the diet. This slowed tumor growth and improved treatment responses in mice, but had little effect on the brain (which makes serine from glucose!)

We worked with @deepak to quantify these changes and noticed something peculiar. The normal brain seemed to make most of its serine from sugar, while the brain cancers seemed to take it up from the environment. This is important-serine can drive cancer growth and recurrence!

Both tissues used lots of sugar. But the normal brain used it to make energy, neurotransmitters, and amino acids. Brain cancers turned these pathways down and instead used sugar to make the building blocks of DNA and RNA, which drive growth and treatment resistance

We worked with neurosurgeon Wajd Al-Holou to infuse small amounts of labeled sugar (glucose) into mouse models and patients with brain cancer and then analyzed tumor and brain tissue to figure out what they used the sugar for. al-holou.lab.medicine.umich.edu/home

Brain cancers like glioblastoma are terrible. They almost always recur-even after aggressive radiation (what I do in the clinic), surgery and chemo. We wanted to understand how these cancers fuel their aggressive nature and treatment resistance.