Abstract
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and most lethal primary brain tumor in adults, causing roughly 14,000 deaths each year in the U.S. alone. Median survival following diagnosis is less than 15 months with maximal surgical resection, radiation, and temozolomide chemotherapy. The challenges inherent in developing more effective GBM treatments have become increasingly clear, and include its unyielding invasiveness, its resistance to standard treatments, its genetic complexity and molecular adaptability, and subpopulations of GBM cells with phenotypic similarities to normal stem cells, herein referred to as glioblastoma stem cells (GSCs). Because GSCs are required for tumor growth and progression, differentiation-based therapy represents a viable treatment modality for these incurable neoplasms. The following protocol describes a collection of procedures to establish a high throughput screening platform aimed at the identification of small molecules that promote GSC astroglial differentiation. At the core of the system is a glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) differentiation reporter-construct. The protocol contains the following general procedures: (1) establishing GSC differentiation reporter lines; (2) testing/validating the relevance of the reporter to GSC self-renewal/clonogenic capacity; and (3) high-capacity flow-cytometry based drug screening. The screening platform provides a straightforward and inexpensive approach to identify small molecules that promote GSCs differentiation. Furthermore, utilization of libraries of FDA-approved drugs holds the potential for the identification of agents that can be repurposed more rapidly. Also, therapies that promote cancer stem cell differentiation are expected to work synergistically with current "standard of care" therapies that have been shown to target and eliminate primarily more differentiated cancer cells.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | e56176 |
Journal | Journal of Visualized Experiments |
Volume | 2018 |
Issue number | 131 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 10 2018 |
Keywords
- Acetyl choline
- Astrocytic differentiation
- Calcium signaling
- Cancer biology
- Differentiation therapy
- Drug screen
- Glioma
- Issue 131
- Lentivirus
- Reporter system
- Stem cells
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Neuroscience(all)
- Chemical Engineering(all)
- Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all)
- Immunology and Microbiology(all)