Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Gliomas account for ~80% of all malignant brain tumors. Glioblastoma (GBM) is a high-grade glioma and is the most common and lethal primary malignant central nervous system tumor. Despite an aggressive standard of care regimen of surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy, 3-year survival rate for GBM patients are just 10%. New therapies are desperately needed for patients diagnosed with gliomas. Harnessing the immune system to combat tumors have been increasingly successful in the last decade. However, more insights into the tumor immunology are needed to develop effective immunotherapies for glial tumors. Majority of the current research on developing immunotherapies depend on genomic analysis of bulk cell populations from tissue biopsies, which precludes distinguishing the role of different components (tumor-vs-immune cells) of the tumor microenvironment (TME). Single-cell methods have been instrumental in resolving some of these complexities. However, a major limitation of these studies is that they require tissue dissociation to isolate single cells, resulting in the loss of spatial information. Tumor/immune spatial relationships, as they pertain to immune infiltration and/or exclusion from the tumor, provide insights into disease stage and overall prognosis. Therefore, novel methodologies need to be developed to study tumor immunobiology while preserving spatial information to comprehensively understand the TME and interpret the data in the context of patient outcome and other clinical characteristics. In this study, I will be using a revolutionary imaging instrument "MIBI" for quantitative, high-resolution, simultaneous imaging of protein markers in glial tumor clinical biopsy tissues without disrupting spatial information. The data from this study will provide insights on tumor immunobiology at a single cell level while preserving spatial information and will provide unique/broad rationale the development of targeted immunotherapy.