Frank Winkler | “Cancer neuroscience of brain tumors”
Keynote speech \ Manfred Eigen lecture theatre
Neural influences regulate cancer initiation, invasion, growth, metastasis, and therapy resistance. Those discoveries have changed the way we think about cancer, and fueled the emerging field of “Cancer Neuroscience”. In this talk I will cover our discovery of neural-like communicating cancer cell networks in primary and metastatic brain tumors (Osswald Nature 2015; Hausmann Nature 2023) and of synaptic connections between neurons and cancer cells in the brain (Venkataramani Nature 2019 and Cell 2022). These neural influences drive brain tumor dissemination and growth. A special emphasis will be put on the clinical translation of the findings to novel Neuroscience-instructed Cancer Therapies, including ongoing clinical trials (Winkler et al. Cell 2023).