Investigators
Emily Fletcher, Terry Johns, Anya Jones, Abbie Francis, Brittany Dewdney, Yasmin Boyle, Sara Rezaeiravesh, Jeffreena Miranda, Zi Ying Ng
Project description
Every year, around 1,500 Australians are diagnosed with brain cancer, and many of them die due to a lack of effective treatments. A promising anti-cancer treatment is targeted therapy, which uses drugs to block the growth machinery of cancer cells. Targeted therapy has proven successful against other cancers but has been ineffective against high grade glioma (HGG), the most common and lethal brain cancer. A key reason for this failure is cell plasticity, a trait of brain cells that makes them flexible in the way they function. HGG cells use this plasticity to evade drugs and we need to understand how this process works to design more effective therapies. We will unravel HGG plasticity by focusing on a group of proteins called voltage-gated sodium channels, proteins known to drive cell plasticity. We will identify, for the first time, the voltage-gated sodium channels present in HGG.