Dr. Michelle Monje
speaker
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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
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There are ongoing processes by which your brain develops.
changes and adapts in response to experience and activity in adulthood.
And so when I started my laboratory as an independent investigator in 2011, essentially the first set of experiments that I did was to test how neuronal activity, the activity of the neural circuits that the cancer is invading, might influence their pathology, might influence their growth, their invasion, and ultimately their resistance to therapy.
And what we found was very striking, and we're still studying it today, the activity of neurons of the patient's brain very powerfully promotes the growth of a wide range of brain cancers.
How?
How do they do it?
So the activity of the nervous system very, very strongly promotes the growth of neurons.
a wide range of these glial cancers, of gliomas, of diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, of glioblastoma, various forms of these glial malignancies, in both kids and in adults.
And so digging a little deeper and through more research, we ultimately realized that the cancer cells were forming real electrophysiologically functional synapses with the neurons, and that that synaptic communication
The electrochemical communication, the electrical currents in the cancer cells, was the fundamental driver of the cancer cell growth and invasion.
Yeah, what's really exciting about this is that it's a whole new avenue of therapeutic opportunities.
So the electrical signaling between the normal brain and the cancer cells is really driving growth and progression.
And we actually know that this is important
even in patients, because the degree to which the cancer is functionally connected to the rest of the brain robustly predicts survival, both in glioblastoma and in diffuse midline gliomas.
So we know that this is important.
And what's exciting is we can disrupt it.
The way that the cancer cells are taking advantage of these signals, the way that the cancer cells are connecting to the neural circuits that they are invading,
is through mechanisms that we've already developed medicines to target.
Certain anti-seizure medicines, medicines of psychiatry, medicines of cardiology even, are designed to target the exact neurotransmitter receptors and ion channels that the cancer is subverting for its own nefarious purposes.
And so when we test some of those medicines that target a particular mechanism we've uncovered that the cancer is using to grow,
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