Illuminating Choroid Plexus Carcinoma Vascularization in Real Time
Choroid plexus carcinoma (CPC) is a rare, aggressive brain cancer arising from the choroid plexus (ChP), a highly complex tissue within the brain's ventricles that produces cerebrospinal fluid. CPC is most often diagnosed in young children, and the only hope for survival is usually total removal of the tumor through surgery. However, this surgery is often complicated due to large tumor size at diagnosis, tumor invasion of nearby brain tissue, and complicated networks of blood vessels in CPC that bleed significantly in the operating room. Our group is interested in investigating mechanisms underlying the elaborate vascular biology in these tumors.
Project Goal:
The goal of this project is to understand molecular drivers of excess blood vessel development in choroid plexus carcinoma (CPC) in real time. We will use patient samples, our laboratory’s established mouse model of CPC, an array of molecular biology techniques, and high-resolution microscopy approaches to characterize the extreme vascular landscape of CPC at the micro (molecular) and macro (whole-animal) levels. Understanding how CPC vasculature differs from healthy choroid plexus in this way should identify critical periods in the fast developmental time course of this disease (and hopefully other brain tumors) and reveal new targets for chemotherapy to "normalize" blood vessels before tumor surgery, enabling more young patients to undergo cure of this horrible cancer.
