Glioblastoma is a malignant brain tumor and is among the most aggressive cancers in humans. Despite multimodal therapy with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, there is still no cure. A major reason is the tumor’s invasive behavior: Glioblastoma cells migrate far beyond the visible tumor into healthy brain tissue. These infiltrating cells cannot be completely removed and seed tumor recurrence—often within just a few months.

“To understand why glioblastoma keeps coming back, we need to look closely at the tumor cells that remain hidden in the brain after surgery,” says Dr. Matthias Schneider, deputy director of the Department of Neurosurgery at the UKB and head of the Brain Tumor Translational Research Group at the UKB and the University of Bonn. “Core2Edge allows us to study these infiltrative tumor cells in a model based entirely on human tissue, closely mirroring what we see in patients.”

The study is published in the journal Nature Protocols.