GBM Spatial Heterogeneity Drug Sensitivity Portal
Neurosphere cultures from different regions of the same GBM tumor show completely different drug sensitivities, yet standard drug screening uses single-biopsy cell lines — meaning published drug sensitivity data for GBM may be systematically misleading about what would work in the whole tumor.
GBM Spatial Heterogeneity Drug Sensitivity Portal
Neurosphere cultures from different regions of the same GBM tumor show completely different drug sensitivities, yet standard drug screening uses single-biopsy cell lines — meaning published drug sensitivity data for GBM may be systematically misleading about what would work in the whole tumor.
Build an open-access portal for GBM multi-region drug sensitivity data, allowing researchers to deposit and query drug response profiles from spatially distinct regions of the same tumor. The platform would store paired metadata: tumor region (enhancing core, non-enhancing margin, infiltrating zone), MRI-defined biopsy location, gene expression of the source biopsy, and drug sensitivity profiles of derived neurospheres. Users could filter by drug class, tumor region, or molecular phenotype.
The portal would also serve as a protocol library: standardized SOPs for multi-region GBM biopsy collection, neurosphere derivation, and drug sensitivity assays, so labs can adopt reproducible methods and deposit comparable data. A collaboration directory would let labs forming multi-institution GBM biobanking consortia find each other.
GBM is the most lethal primary brain tumor, and spatial heterogeneity is a root cause of treatment failure — drugs that work against one tumor region fail against adjacent resistant subclones. A shared, annotated dataset of multi-region sensitivity profiles would help the field understand whether any drugs show consistent activity across regions, and might reveal spatial patterns (e.g., infiltrating zones are uniformly resistant to X while core regions are not). This could directly inform multi-drug combination strategies for GBM.
Who Is This For?
Neuro-oncology researchers with GBM tissue access, bioinformaticians analyzing tumor heterogeneity, and clinicians designing GBM clinical trials that need to account for spatial drug resistance.
Skills & Tools Needed
- Web application and database development
- Bioinformatics (drug sensitivity analysis, gene expression correlation)
- Laboratory biology background (neurosphere culture, drug assays)
- Data standards/ontologies for cancer sample metadata
- Scientific community building and consortium coordination
Feasibility
medium — The portal infrastructure is buildable, but value depends on community adoption and data deposition — a challenge for any open data platform in biomedical research.
Inspired by: Multi-region biopsies and patient-derived neurosphere cultures reveal spatial divergence in glioblastoma.
