Frederick Varn, PhD

Glioblastoma is a fast-growing and deadly brain cancer. Current treatments, like brain surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, help, but most patients live for only about one year. Older patients with glioblastoma tend to do worse than younger patients, but we do not fully understand why. We believe that changes in the brain as people get older might help the cancer grow faster. Our project will explore whether changes in a part of the brain called white matter make it easier for glioblastoma to grow in older patients. Studying this in humans is difficult because it’s not safe to measure these changes in the brain while a patient is alive. To solve this, we will study mice, which have brains that change in similar ways as they age. We will examine whether tumors grow in the white matter more often in older mice compared to younger ones and try to identify the cells that allow this growth. To confirm our results, we will also study the white matter of human patients who died from glioblastoma to check if older patients are more likely to develop tumors in this area. The results from our study will help explain why glioblastoma is worse in older patients. This knowledge could help us find new treatments that slow tumor growth and help patients live longer.