Dr. Michelle Monje

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133 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Dr. Michelle Monje’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · Why is brain cancer so hard to treat? · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

Part of the challenge is the blood-brain barrier and getting sufficient quantities of the drug to the tumor.

Part of the problem is treating enough of the brain.

When you can't get through the blood-brain barrier, you can deliver the drug right to the tumor.

But these are not localized diseases.

These are cancers that really spread very far and wide throughout the nervous system very early in the disease course.

And so you have to treat a large volume of brain.

You have to get enough of the drug to the cancer cell.

And much of cancer biology has thought about cancer in isolation.

A lot of drug development is focused on screening cancer cells alone in a Petri dish.

What kills them?

What do they need to grow that we can take away?

What are the mutations that cause them to occur in the first place that we can disrupt pharmacologically and then disrupt their sort of growth driving engine?

That's what most of oncology does.

But things are very different when you take a cancer cell and don't study it in a petri dish when you put it into the brain itself.

Suddenly...

Those medicines that work very well when the cancers are alone in a petri dish don't work very well in the context of either the mouse brain or the patient's brain.

But there's much more going on than just the difficulty of getting the cancer cells exposed to helpful medicines when we think about brain cancer.

And what has become clear over the last decade or so is that the cancer cells' interactions with the nervous system protect it from these therapies.

They protect it from the therapies and really are the fundamental driver of both growth and invasion.

So maybe I can take a step back and say that we talked earlier about how these cancers emerge from brain development gone wrong in children and brain plasticity gone wrong in adults.

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