Video: Fishing rod reels brain tumour cells to their death

Let’s go fishing… for cancer cells. A tiny rod has been developed that reels in brain tumour cells and guides them out of the brain to their death.

Glioblastoma is the most common and aggressive type of adult brain cancer. It is lethal and very difficult to operate on because of the large size and inaccessible location of the tumours.

Rather than engineer ever more toxic drugs to kill glioblastoma cells deep in the brain, Ravi Bellamkonda – based at Emory University School of Medicine and Georgia Institute of Technology, both in Atlanta – and his team wondered if they could move the tumours to a more accessible location.


Glioblastoma cells normally move around the brain by latching on to nerves and blood vessels. To divert their path, Bellamkonda and his team created a polymer rod 6 millimetres long. Inside the rod, they placed a thin film – 10 micrometres thick – that mimics the shape of nerves and blood vessels. The cells seem to like a convex or concave shape, he says, so you don’t need any additional chemicals or proteins.

At the top end of the rod is a blob of gel containing a drug that kills glioblastoma cells. The idea is simple: tumour cells mistake the rod for a nerve or blood vessel, travel up it and meet their death at the end. “In a crazy way this is a case where the tumour comes to the drug rather than the drug going to the tumour,” says Bellamkonda.

Walking the plank

To test their design, Bellamkonda’s team grafted human glioblastoma tumours into rat brains. They then inserted the rod into the tumour, with the gel sitting just above the surface of the skull. After 15 days, the majority of the tumour cells had migrated along the fibre to meet their doom.

“The residual tumour that didn’t enter the fibre shrank by almost 90 per cent,” says Bellamkonda. “We did a careful analysis to make sure that we weren’t just giving another route for the tumour to grow into, but it showed that essentially we displaced the tumour from one location to another.”

The technique will not completely rid the patient of cancer, but Bellamkonda suggests that it might be used to move an inoperable tumour to an area closer to the surface of the brain where it can be surgically removed, or it could shrink and maintain tumours at a size at which they do no damage. Because the rods are so thin, they should be able to be inserted into a person’s brain without causing disruption.

The team has also tested the technique on isolated breast cancer cells and prostate cancer in the lab. They hope that it could be used to manage many other kinds of slow-growing tumours by giving them a similar fatal path to migrate along.

Journal reference: Nature Materials, DOI: 10.1038/nmat3878