Brain Metastases: From Mechanisms to Treatment

A special issue of Cancers (ISSN 2072-6694). This special issue belongs to the section "Cancer Metastasis".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 April 2025 | Viewed by 323

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Cancer Biology, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston Salem, NC, USA
Interests: drug delivery system to facilitate brain cancer-targeted molecular imaging diagnosis and imaging-guided drug delivery; novel nanoparticle-immunotherapy system to elicit anticancer immunity

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Guest Editor
Department of Radiation Oncology, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston Salem, NC, USA
Interests: stereotactic radiosurgery, brain metastasis velocity, brain metastasis biomarkers

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Brain metastasis is the most common intracranial malignancy in adults. The current standard of care for brain metastasis includes surgical resection, stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) and/or whole brain radiotherapy (WBRT). However, the prognosis for patients with brain metastasis is extremely poor, with a median survival of 8 to 16 months.

We are putting together a Special Issue of Cancers focusing on brain metastasis, which we hope will include recent advances in understanding mechanisms that underlie the development of brain metastasis and its tumor microenvironment (TME), such as the blood–tumor barrier (BTB), and in seeking new disease-specific biomarkers and novel treatment and combinatory treatment. We welcome contributions of both preclinical and clinical studies, as review articles or original research papers, on this clinically significant topic.

Prof. Dr. Dawen Zhao
Prof. Dr. Michael Chan
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • brain metastasis
  • the tumor microenvironment
  • blood–tumor barrier
  • novel biomarkers and therapeutics
  • radiation therapy

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

15 pages, 4099 KiB  
Article
Exposed Phosphatidylserine as a Biomarker for Clear Identification of Breast Cancer Brain Metastases in Mouse Models
by Lulu Wang, Alan H. Zhao, Chad A. Arledge, Fei Xing, Michael D. Chan, Rolf A. Brekken, Amyn A. Habib and Dawen Zhao
Cancers 2024, 16(17), 3088; https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers16173088 - 5 Sep 2024
Viewed by 153
Abstract
Brain metastasis is the most common intracranial malignancy in adults. The prognosis is extremely poor, partly because most patients have more than one brain lesion, and the currently available therapies are nonspecific or inaccessible to those occult metastases due to an impermeable blood–tumor [...] Read more.
Brain metastasis is the most common intracranial malignancy in adults. The prognosis is extremely poor, partly because most patients have more than one brain lesion, and the currently available therapies are nonspecific or inaccessible to those occult metastases due to an impermeable blood–tumor barrier (BTB). Phosphatidylserine (PS) is externalized on the surface of viable endothelial cells (ECs) in tumor blood vessels. In this study, we have applied a PS-targeting antibody to assess brain metastases in mouse models. Fluorescence microscopic imaging revealed that extensive PS exposure was found exclusively on vascular ECs of brain metastases. The highly sensitive and specific binding of the PS antibody enables individual metastases, even micrometastases containing an intact BTB, to be clearly delineated. Furthermore, the conjugation of the PS antibody with a fluorescence dye, IRDye 800CW, or a radioisotope, 125I, allowed the clear visualization of individual brain metastases by optical imaging and autoradiography, respectively. In conclusion, we demonstrated a novel strategy for targeting brain metastases based on our finding that abundant PS exposure occurs on blood vessels of brain metastases but not on normal brain, which may be useful for the development of imaging and targeted therapeutics for brain metastases. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Brain Metastases: From Mechanisms to Treatment)
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