The 22-year-old growing mini-brains in petri dishes to fight brain cancer
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- 31 May 2022
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In a laboratory in Newtown, Wellington, 22-year-old Freya​ Weth​ is firing blood pressure medications and viagra at human brain tissue.
“If we could use these to treat cancer, it would be amazing,” Weth said.
Weth, originally from Palmerston North, is growing ‘mini-brains’ out of donated tissue from patients treated for brain cancer at Wellington Hospital and testing them against drugs commonly found in medicine cabinets.
The aim is to see how the drugs affect the growth of tumour tissue, building on existing research at the Gillies McIndoe Research Institute led by Dr Swee Tan, which found beta-blockers could be used to cause the tumours to "self-destruct" without the need for invasive procedures.
Beta-blockers are common, affordable medications used to lower blood pressure. This is traditionally what viagra was made to do, Weth said, “then it had this weird side effect”.
“These drugs have already been tested for efficacy and safety in humans, so we know they are good.”
She aimed to use samples from 12 brains over the three-year research – and she was still looking for a couple more donations.
“We take a bunch of different drug cocktails and combinations and dosages and test and see how cells respond, whether they live and die and also how cellular pathways are affected by these different treatments,” Weth said.
Weth’s method enables the Institute to test more drugs in a shorter time frame, the research institute’s chief scientist Dr Clint Gray​ said.
“Freya’s work will inform and support future clinical trial work that targets cancer tumours by repurposing low-cost, off-patent, safe oral medications.”
Her PhD work was a discovery project, Gray said “so we’re looking at anything and everything”.
The method – growing these mini-brains or organoids – means what Weth sees in the lab will mirror what would happen in people.
The research institute is developing a research platform that combines organoids technology with genome engineering. Gray said the platform would help to develop models for studying human cancer and drug discovery through drug repurposing. Read More…
