Guest Editors
Georgios Giamas
University of Sussex
Professor Georgios Giamas obtained his Biology degree (BSc) at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. He then undertook his Doctoral degree (PhD - magna cum laude) at the University of Ulm in Germany. Following postdoctoral work at the University of Ulm, he moved to Imperial College London at 2007, working as a Research Associate in the Division of Surgery and Cancer. In 2011, he was awarded Imperial College's prestigious Junior Research Fellowship. In 2012, he was awarded a NIHR Senior Research Fellowship and was appointed as a Research Team Leader. In July 2015, he became an Associate Professor (Reader) in Cell Signalling at University of Sussex while holding an honorary contract (Visiting Reader) with Imperial College. Since May 2018, he is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedicine at the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex.
Thomas Simon
University of Sussex
Dr. Thomas Simon is a research fellow at Professor Giamas' lab at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. He obtained a PhD in France at the University of Rouen in 2014 before joining Professor Giamas' lab in 2016, where he took over glioblastoma-related projects. His main research interest lies in deciphering interactions between cancer and normal cells in the tumor microenvironment. Current research in Giamas' lab is focuses on glioblastoma (GBM), a very aggressive form of brain cancer. More specifically, Dr. Simon and his team aim to describe how GBM cells can communicate with its direct microenvironment via extracellular vesicles (EVs). EVs are nano-sized membrane-enclosed vesicles that contain genetic information, such as RNA and DNA, but also proteins and lipids. EVs can travel long distances, hence allowing communication between different sites in the body. For these reasons, EVs have been recently shown to have key roles during cancer progression, resistance to therapies, and metastasis. Dr. Simon recently published two reports on the role of EVs in GBM resistance to bevacizumab, an anti-angiogenic therapy used to treat recurrent GBM, and the potential use of cell-derived extracellular vesicles as reservoir for GBM subtyping (Simon et al., 2018; Lane et al., 2019). His most recent research has shown that the proteomic content of EVs could mirror the molecular signature and invasiveness potential of GBM cell lines in vitro. Dr. Simon and his team are currently trying to validate these results using blood derived EVs obtained from patients’ samples. They indeed believe that EVs have great potential for a use in a liquid biopsy set up, which would greatly help GBM diagnosis and prognosis.
Collection Overview
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and most aggressive brain tumor. Prognosis remains poor, despite the combined treatment of radio- and chemotherapy following surgical removal. GBM cells coexist with normal non-neoplastic cells, including endothelial cells, astrocytes and immune cells, constituting a dynamic tumor microenvironment (TME). The presence of the blood brain barrier (BBB), which regulates exchanges between the central nervous system and the circulating blood, further complexifies the GBM TME. In fact, GBM therapeutic resistance and aggressiveness highly depends on the constant crosstalk with the surrounding TME. Such communication involves direct contact and paracrine interactions, for instance via extracellular vesicles (EVs), which are yet to be fully described. Nevertheless, fully deciphering such mechanisms appears essential for describing new therapeutic targets and potential biomarkers in order to improve GBM treatment. Consequently, considering the highly integrated microenvironment in which GBM tumors develop, innovative experimental systems are thus needed in order to improve the clinical impact of in vitro studies. The present collection thus introduces protocols and cell culture models allowing to reproduce some characteristics of the complex GBM TME in vitro, as opposed to usual, ‘flat’, methods. This way, we hope to provide innovative and accessible methods that will allow GBM researchers to improve the relevance of their in vitro data for potential clinical applications.
