New EU project to improve chances of treating brain tumours
IGP researcher Géraldine Giraud is one of the partners in the newly initiated EU project Gliomatch, where researchers from ten countries will develop personalised therapy for brain tumours in adults and children. Géraldine Giraud will coordinate a national collection of control samples from children.
The brain tumour types adult glioblastoma and paediatric high-grade gliomas are very severe diseases with extremely low survival rates. This is partly due to the tumours being very heterogenous and difficult to treat with standard therapies. Lately, immunotherapy has been showing great promise for some cancer forms but unfortunately it is only effective for some brain tumour patients and there are currently no good methods to identify those that could benefit from this type of treatment.
In Gliomatch the goal is to develop strategies that clinicians can used to categorise individuals according to their immune system characteristics and thereby customise treatments and make them more effective. For instance, the researchers will perform clinical trials to analyse more than 300 patients with glioblastoma or paediatric high-grade and compare with control samples.
Research supported by the Swedish Childhood Cancer Fund
Since one year back, Geraldine Giraud also has a researcher four-year position funded by the Swedish Childhood Cancer Fund. With this support she is analysing cancer specific genes and proteins to better understand biology of paediatric high-grade gliomas and she is studying how latent cancer cells driving relapses can be treated. Also in this project, the goal is to develop personalised therapy and to improve the dismal prognoses of the affected children.
Géraldine Giraud's research in Fredrik Swartling's group
More about Gliomatch:
- Awarded Euro 12 million euro, out of which Euro 335 000 to Uppsala University
- 14 partners from the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Israel, Norway, UK, Germany and Switzerland
- Gliomatch's web