Russia, Italy create project to study work of genes in brain cancer cells

By Alimat Aliyeva

Russian and Italian scientists have launched a joint project to study how genes function in individual cells of glioma, a form of brain cancer, as well as the microenvironment generated by this tumor, Azernews reports.

"Professor Aldo Spallone recently joined our laboratory. Together with our colleagues from Italy, we plan to use advanced DNA sequencing technologies to study gene activity at the level of individual glioma cells. We are already working on the data that is publicly available," Poptsova said at the conference "Finding new ways to develop Russian-Italian cooperation in the field of biomedicine."

Scientists also hope to start collecting such data in the near future using DNA sequencing systems that already exist in Italy and are also being developed in Russia. These data will help scientists gain a clearer understanding of how the glioma growth process proceeds and how this tumor interacts with the surrounding healthy tissues of the nervous system.

Glioma is one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer, which is diagnosed annually in about 250 thousand patients. As a rule, most patients die 12-15 months after the detection of a neoplasm, the therapy of which is hampered by a small number of drugs capable of penetrating into the brain, as well as the high resistance of glioma cells to various forms of immunotherapy.