Affiliation: 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.