Project UNITE – together against glioblastomas

Herr Prof. Wick, what does UNITE stand for?

UNITE means to band together or to join forces and this is precisely what we want to achieve with this new collaborative research center. In the coming four years, we want to bring together the expertise of scientists from Heidelberg and Mannheim in order to better understand glioblastomas and to develop treatment strategies. This unique alliance of experts in the field of Neuro-oncology is also reflected in our organization: Co-Speakers of UNITE are Prof. Dr. Michael Platten, Director of the Department of Neurology at Mannheim University Hospital and Head of a Clinical Cooperation Unit at the DKFZ and Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfister, Director of the Hopp Children’s Cancer Center at Heidelberg. The German Research Foundation is providing about eleven million euros for our project.

Why are glioblastomas so difficult to treat?

The following applies to all brain tumors: The cancer grows where we locate the center of our personality, and a disease in the “central steering organ” triggers great fears in everybody. In contrast to other, frequently even benign brain tumors, glioblastoma in children and adults is a severe and mostly fatal disease, however. There are no known risk factors and both children and older persons are affected, who are then suddenly removed from their everyday life. In addition, there is the special structure of these tumors …

Some experts refer to glioblastomas as a “second brain”, am I right?

Indeed, there are similarities which never fail to fascinate us neuroscientists. We were able to determine, for example, that the tumor cells frequently appear with a widely branched structure, are linked to each other through a kind of tubular system, and can even move in the brain. In a current publication researchers at the Hospital and the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg even demonstrated that the brain’s nerve cells enter into contact with the tumor cells. In this way, the nerve cells send signals to the cancer cells and the tumor benefits from this “input”: the activation signals are probably a driving force for tumor growth and the invasion of healthy brain tissue by tumor cells.

News of the publication (German): “Nervenzellen feuern Hirntumorzellen zum Wachstum an”

What does the new collaborative research center want to do differently?

Our research project assumes that there are sub-classes of patients with a clear treatment benefit – at least for a certain period of time – both through radiation and chemotherapy and also through experimental, targeted, or immunotherapy treatment strategies. Our goal: We want to break down the disease into individual diseases, because the real cases in the hospitals show that the patients respond very differently to treatments. We have to get to know our opponent better! A second aspect is that we want to find new medications because many of the currently used substances actually come from the Stone Age, when seen from the pharmacological perspective.

How do you do this?

We will focus less on research into the causes, because unfortunately there still are no possibilities for prevention and no early detection options for glioblastomas. What we are interested in is obtaining an improvement in the prospects for patients who are already ill: How can we grasp the various sub-types of glioblastomas using molecular-biological markers? Where do the respective weak spots lie and how can we attack there? In all, there will be 20 sub-projects based on three equal cornerstones: We use a uniform, common tissue platform comprising 100 samples, process our hypothesis on the highest technical level, and concentrate on implementable results.

And what is your objective?

Making glioblastoma treatable, of course!

More about the new collaborative research center can be found here

Lecture by Prof. Wolfgang Wick on the subject of brain cancer research on YouTube