UCLA Researcher Awarded $800,000 for Brain Cancer Study

A UCLA researcher has received an $800,000 grant to study how glioblastoma cells become resistant to targeted cancer treatments, UCLA officials announced Tuesday. Jason Zhang, an assistant professor of bioengineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a member of the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, received the grant from the V Foundation for Cancer Research. Glioblastoma is an aggressive brain tumor that can be difficult to treat in part because tumors contain different types of cancer cells. While treatment can eliminate some cells, others can survive, adapt and continue growing, according to UCLA. Zhang's research will examine how glioblastoma cells become resistant to drugs designed to block signals that drive tumor growth. Some cancer cells can activate alternative pathways that restore signals needed for their survival even after a drug blocks its primary target, researchers said. Zhang and his team plan to use artificial intelligence to design protein-based sensors that will allow researchers to observe growth signals inside individual living cancer cells during treatment. The researchers will use patient-derived tumor models designed to capture key features of the brain and the diversity of human glioblastoma tumors. The project will be conducted in collaboration with UCLA scientists Aparna Bhaduri, an assistant professor of medicine and biological chemistry, and David Nathanson, a professor of molecular and medical pharmacology, officials said. Researchers hope the work will help identify small populations of glioblastoma cells that can be missed when tumors are studied as a whole. Determining how those cells activate alternative survival signals could help researchers develop combinations of therapies intended to prevent cancer cells from escaping treatment. 'Understanding how these cells escape treatment is critical for developing better therapies,' Zhang said. 'This support from the V Foundation will allow us to look at glioblastoma in a fundamentally different way, not as one uniform tumor, but as a collection of individual cancer cells that can respond to treatment in very different ways.' Zhang is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.