Advanced Medical Scientist-Programm 2025

Thema: "Characteristic macrophages in glioblastomas"

Zusammenfassung:
Glioblastomas (GBM) are one of the most aggressive primary brain tumors in adults. Despite various strategies including differential single cell gene expression analyses between GBM and healthy tissues, none of the resulting findings could benefit the development of promising therapies, yet. Various macrophage populations coevolve in the tumor microenvironment of GBMs and not only support a tumor immune evasion but also tumor spreading throughout the surrounding tissue, ultimately resulting an incomplete resectability with very high recidive frequencies. We could identify a Siglec10+CX3CR1+ macrophage population, which was specific to GBMs when compared to other very frequent tumor entities like meningiomas (MNGs), non-GBM gliomas and metastases (MTS).
In our project, we will characterize this potentially pro-tumorigenic Siglec10+CX3CR1+ macrophage population on transcriptome level, test its capacity to modulate tumor and immune cells in their microenvironment, describe their generation in presence of GBM tumor cells and analyze metabolic alterations in their local, residential microenvironment. Our goal is to distillate unique markers or interaction mechanisms as targets for new promising therapies. Modulation of these macrophages could stop the diffuse growth of GBMs and potentially would result in a total resectability of GBMs without recurrence.