Glioblastoma Research to Improve the Lives of Patients
By Rikki Clark, Acadia University and BHCRI Summer Student
Glioblastoma is a devastating and universally deadly form of brain cancer with an uncanny ability to change and evade current standard of care treatments. This makes glioblastoma truly formidable both to research and to treat. In fact, only 5% of patients can hope to live as long as five years following a diagnosis with this disease. Thankfully, BHCRI members Dr. Adrienne Weeks, a highly skilled neurosurgeon and physician-scientist, and Dr. Jeremy Roy, a talented researcher investigating liquid biopsy as a method of diagnosis, are collaborating to find more effective ways to monitor and treat this deadly disease.
Dr. Weeks and Dr. Roy began working together in early 2020 with a specific goal in mind: find an effective, minimally invasive way to confirm tumour recurrence in glioblastoma patients. While it is a certainty that glioblastoma will recur in all patients, Dr. Weeks has expressed how challenging it is to verify when the disease recurs in living patients. As a result, life-lengthening treatment is often delayed due to uncertainty about the actual presence of new or growing tumours. Imaging technologies such as MRIs are currently used to diagnose and monitor brain tumours, but these technologies are limited in their use because they are only able to detect tumours once they have grown to a size that is already threatening to the patient. Dr. Roy, who has long been interested in developing liquid biopsy technologies, is developing a blood test that will be capable of detecting glioblastoma long before the tumours have grown to a size detectable by MRI. To date, Dr. Weeks and Dr. Roy have worked with 29 glioblastoma patients who have generously donated both their time and their blood to assist with the development of this blood test. This first step toward more accurate diagnostics and monitoring for glioblastoma patients would be exciting on its own, but Dr. Weeks and Dr. Roy have even more intriguing news to share. The preliminary results from their research show that this blood test has the potential to provide the early diagnosis of tumour recurrence that glioblastoma patients so desperately need and can already differentiate between stable patients and patients in relapse.
The research being conducted by Dr. Weeks and Dr. Roy has the potential to change the lives of glioblastoma patients and their families for the better, but they consider this a first step on the long road to improving patient survival and quality of life. Both Dr. Weeks and Dr. Roy dream of a future when their blood test makes it possible to diagnose patients in the earliest stage of disease when there is still the potential to cure the patient, but they are doing much more than simply dreaming. Dr. Weeks and Dr. Roy are actively turning their dream, a dream shared by every person touched by glioblastoma, into a reality.