Novel approaches for treating a highly invasive cancer

About this project

<p>This project will develop novel approaches for treating a highly invasive cancer that responds poorly to treatments. Glioblastoma is the most frequent and deadliest form of brain cancer and represents a major health problem affecting many young children. Radiotherapy plays a crucial role in glioma treatment, however, glioma cells survive the treatment, one underlying reason being the presence of cancer stem cells that have high&nbsp;DNA repair capacity.</p> <p>One promising strategy to improve treatment is therefore to combine radiotherapy with inhibitors of DNA repair. We aim at identifying radiation-drug combinations inhibiting DNA repair and exploring how such treatment combinations work in cells irradiated with high&nbsp;versus low&nbsp;radiotherapy . We also aim at identifying new promising biomarkers signatures that may support the development of personalized treatment of patients.&nbsp;<br> An original approach will be employed by using a new DNA repair high-throughput drug screening, unique in the world, available at Norwegian partner, to identify drugs that could be used as glioma radiosensitizers in association with conventional low-LET and with high-LET particle therapy.</p> <p>&nbsp;The society will benefit through the development of new and better strategies to treat cancer.</p> <p>The expertise of the Romanian team will be highly enhanced in the topic of mechanisms driven the DNA repair following the radiotherapy procedure and &nbsp;the Norwegian researchers &nbsp;will be better prepared for exploiting a new proton radiotherapy centre (to be opened in 2023). The outcome of the project will allow a good chance to develop new long-term collaborations with hospitals that could be end-users.&nbsp;</p>

Bilateral cooperation results

Given the common research direction of the consortium partners and the complementarity of the molecular biology techniques used, the current project represented the initiation of a long term collaboration between the partners IFIN-HH and OUH. We maintained a close collaboration during the project. We submitted four joint papers to be published in international journal and we still have in preparation two more joint papers. Moreover, the multidisciplinary approach of this project will have impact beyond the two main partners involved through dissemination and project progress and activities with the associated collaborators (CEA and DMU). The success of this project consolidated/developed long-term collaborations on biological effects of hadrontherapy/X-ray radiotherapy in combination with drugs in the treatment of radioresistant glioblastoma in the frame of EU framework calls (i.e EURATOM Programme at topic Medical Application) starting from the actual consortium formula. CEA and IFIN-HH are already members of the Infrastructure Nationale (France and Romania) Hadron. CEA is also a founding member of ARCHADE (Advanced Resource Center for HADrontherapy) association. OUH will use the results for future research exploiting the new proton radiotherapy centre at OUH (to be opened in 2025). All the consortium members initiated and /or are part of several European Union grants. The agreements were done during this project to assure the traceability of the protocols used by each partner and will provide a solid basis to enlarge such type of approach by attracting other European laboratories in this collaboration enhancing the chances not only to get new results, but also to produce highly reproducible data and information necessary to standardize the protocols.

Project partners

• University of Oslo Donor project partner· Norway