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Dr. Monje-Deisseroth and her team at Stanford University recently published a paper detailing how gliomas are able to “hijack” the brain’s communication system.

Published in  Nature: High-grade gliomas are lethal brain cancers whose progression is robustly regulated by neuronal activity. Activity-regulated release of growth factors promotes glioma growth, but this alone is insufficient to explain the effect that neuronal activity exerts on glioma progression. Here we show that neuron and glioma interactions include electrochemical communication through bona fide AMPA receptor-dependent neuron–glioma synapses. Read More

Congratulations to two of our Center of Excellence teams lead by Dr Javad Nazarian and Dr. Michelle Monje on their recent groundbreaking research publication. Due in part to increased access to post-mortem tissuethe teams were able to study a larger sample of DIPG tumors.  Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma is a lethal pediatric brain cancer characterized by H3K27M histone mutation. Nagaraja et al. characterize a large cohort of rare primary tumors and normal pontine tissue to reveal active regulatory element heterogeneity dependent upon the histone variant and cell context in which the mutation occurs. Read More

Pediatric Brain Cancer Tissue Donation article_2016

Overcoming Autopsy Barriers in Pediatric Cancer Research

Autopsy Brain Tissue Shortage

Study on Collection of autopsy tissue in DIPG patients_Oct 2010

 A bi-institutional collaborative effort to outline a procedure for obtaining a rapid autopsy in order to collect high quality post-mortem tissue for genomic analysis _ April 2018

Next-Generation Rapid Autopsies Enable Tumor Evolution Tracking_January 2018

The clinical, research, and social value of autopsy after any cancer death