Inside the ‘machinery’ of brain tumors

Diane and Bruce Halle Neuro-Oncology Research Laboratory

Pioneering researcher Dr. Burt Feuerstein studies brain tumor molecule machinery in hopes of classifying the tumors and determining how they start and behave. His research at Barrow Neurological Institute is made possible by people like Diane and Bruce Halle, who support neuro-oncology research through generous gifts to Barrow Neurological Foundation. To support research at Barrow click here.

Burt Feuerstein, MD, PhD, a senior scientist at Barrow Neurological Institute, has been studying brain tumors for nearly a quarter of a century, and from his vantage point, the discoveries made in brain tumor research have been “immeasurable.”

“When I started medical school in the early 70s, cancer was a complete mystery. We didn’t know why cancers grow and metastasize, and we didn’t even know how our effective drugs worked. Now we understand that the disease stems from broken parts of normal cellular machinery and how some drugs jerryrig the broken pieces. And we are working on better ways to more fully repair broken cells,” explains Dr. Feuerstein.

Despite those advances, much still needs to be understood about brain cancer. According to the National Cancer Institute, about 19,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with the disease each year—with many of those diagnoses for breast and lung cancer. The most common and aggressive tumor that starts in the brain is glioblastoma multiforme (GBN).

It accounts for about half of brain cancer cases, and most patients live only 15 months after they are diagnosed.

In 2006, Dr. Feuerstein, a pioneer in brain tumor genetics and therapeutics, was recruited from the University of California-San Francisco to establish an international center of brain tumor research at Barrow, anchored in the Diane and Bruce Halle Neuro-Oncology Research Lab. Dr. Feuerstein’s vision for the lab, located at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in downtown Phoenix, is to build a program where brain tumor scientists and clinicians work together to develop new ways to diagnose and treat disease.

Relevant to real patients

The main focus of the neuro-oncology lab is translational science. The scientists use tissue removed from a patient’s brain tumor to make sure that their studies are relevant to real patients. One approach is to bring together teams of basic scientists and clinicians to ask whether broken molecular parts of cellular machinery constitutes a molecular marker of disease—that is, whether they predict a tumor’s response to therapy or a patient’s length of survival.

In addition, the clinical relationship gives scientists a good reason to develop tumor models to manipulate the broken molecule of cellular machinery to see how it affects the model. If there is an effect, the manipulation might constitute a new therapy, and the team can start on the road to develop one.

Dr. Feuerstein and his colleagues hope that studying brain tumor molecule machinery to classify brain tumors and determining how they start and behave will point toward ways to control abnormal brain tumor machinery in patients and will lead to better ways to evaluate and treat disease.

“We know there are certain genes that play a role in the growth and death of brain tumor cells,” Dr. Feuerstein says. “But if we can distinguish these genes, we might be able to treat or even prevent disease.”