Several researchers report on the use of HoloMonitor in the fight against severe brain cancers
When tumours metastasize cancer cells travel through the body to reach a new location where another tumor can develop. Understanding of how different treatment options affect cell motility and cell migration is thus essential when exploring the effects of new treatment options in the fight against cancer.
In recent years several publications have reported on the use of HoloMonitor® M4 to map cell movements. Now, two new peer-reviewed articles have been published showing how HoloMonitor was used to explore changes in cell motility and cell migration induced by new potential treatment regimens for severe types of brain cancer.
In ITGA2 as a potential nanotherapeutic target for glioblastoma, Scientific Reports, April 2019, P. Guo and coworkers at Boston Children´s Hospital at Harvard Medical School in the US, report on a cell surface antigen, ITGA2, that is highly expressed in human glioblastoma cells. The researchers have identified and evaluated this antigen as a drug target for glioblastoma, a very aggressive and incurable type of brain cancer. Their evaluation includes results using HoloMonitor to show that ITGA2 significantly reduces the speed of human glioblastoma cells. At the same time cell migration, i.e. the distance cells travelled decreased.
The authors conclude that:
“These findings may have significant clinical potential for GBM therapy and diagnosis and support further research into the use of ITGA2 as a therapeutic target for GBM”.
In another publication, The long noncoding RNA TP73‐AS1 promotes tumorigenicity of medulloblastoma cells, J Int. cancer, May 2019, M Varon et al, focused their research on medulloblastoma; the most common malignant brain cancer in children. Functionality and role of a long noncoding RNA, TP73-AS1, were explored. The authors employed HoloMonitor to evaluate TP73-AS1 effect on cell motility and showed that it promotes migration of human medulloblastoma cells:
“Using the HoloMonitor M4 cell tracking software to record the trajectories of TP73-AS1 kd and control DAOY cells, we found differences in the movement patterns of the kd cells compared to the controls. Note, using live imaging, we excluded dividing or dying cells from the analysis”.
In both studies, the HoloMonitor cell tracking module was used to analyse motility and migration of human brain cancer cells. Read more about HoloMonitor cell motility and migration assays here.
