"Using brain tumor organoids to evaluate efficacy of novel inhibitors"

Sarah Stuart, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has received IFER funding from 2019-2022 for her project, “Using brain tumor organoids to evaluate efficacy of novel inhibitors.” Sarah's project seeks to establish a large, patient-derived organoid collection to screen drugs to treat glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain cancer. She will acquire resected glioblastoma tumors from surgeons at Royal Melbourne Hospital and will generate fifty organoid cultures over the course of her funding. She will screen seven new and FDA-approved drugs using these cell models and will then determine if the drugs inhibit critical signaling pathways in the organoids. Her project will enable the study of glioblastoma in a human-relevant way and has the potential to reduce reliance on glioblastoma animal models on a large scale, as the brain tumor organoids generated from her project will be shared with national and international collaborators.