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VIRTUAL EVENT: Injury and brain cancer, two sides of the same coin?
06 February 2024, 5:00 pm–6:00 pm
Prof Simona Parrinello will talk about the intriguing connection between injury and brain cancer.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Emiliana Di Donna & Dr Zahra Mohri – Faculty of Medical Sciences
World Cancer Day takes place every 4 February. UCL Faculty of Medical Sciences is dedicating the February Public Lecture to raising cancer awareness and encouraging its prevention, detection, and treatment. The focus of the lecture will be on glioblastoma.
Glioblastoma is the most common type of brain tumour in adults. Though current treatments extend survival they are not curative. Our research aims to improve our understanding of glioblastoma biology, with the goal to develop more effective therapies. An important aspect of this is understanding how glioblastoma tumours develop in the first place. It is well-known that tumours arise from cells that acquire mutations and begin to divide uncontrollably. However, recent studies unexpectedly revealed that even normal tissues contain many mutations. A key question is how these mutations can remain silent and, conversely, what activates them when tumours do form. We have explored this question in glioblastoma and found an important role in brain injury resulting from both traumatic insults to the brain and injury inflicted by growing tumour cells on their surrounding normal tissue. Prof Simona Parrinello will discuss how brain injury shapes all stages of glioblastoma development and how unravelling this complex and bidirectional interaction is beginning to uncover new avenues for intervention.
This lecture will be followed by a Q&A with our speaker Prof Simona Parrinello, UCL Cancer Institute.
Follow the conversation on Twitter: #FMSLectures
Accessibility
This event will take place online. A link to the event will be sent to you prior to the event start time.
Live captioning is available for this event.
We aim to make our events as inclusive as possible. If you have any accessibility requirements or enquiries that are not covered in this profile, please contact the events team at fms.education@ucl.ac.uk. Please allow as much time as possible before the event to ensure we are able to make reasonable adjustments.
About the Speaker
Prof Simona Parrinello
Professor of Neuro-oncology
Simona Parrinello is professor of neuro-oncology at the UCL Cancer Institute, which she joined in 2018. She also leads the Samantha Dickson brain cancer unit and co-leads the CRUK Brain Tumour Centre of Excellence. Parrinello’s research focuses on adult neurogenesis and brain cancer. In particular, her group studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms that control neural stem cell behavior and how these mechanisms become deregulated to drive tumourigenesis in glioblastoma, with a focus on the role of the microenvironment. Prior to her move to UCL, Parrinello was a group leader and honorary Reader at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences, Imperial College London, where she first established her research group in 2011. She carried out her postdoctoral training at the UCL Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology as an EMBO and Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow and received her PhD from the University of California, at Berkeley.