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Our Science: The Enemy Within

As part of the UCSF Brain Tumor Center, our primary objective is to develop treatments for high-grade gliomas, including glioblastoma. Despite advancements in neurosurgery, chemoradiation, and targeted therapies, the prognosis for newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients remains poor, with a median survival of only 12-16 months, and the vast majority of patients develop recurrence with treatment-resistant disease.

Reasons for this include the diffusely infiltrative invasion of the tumor into normal brain, the presence of the blood-brain barrier which prevents penetration of most therapeutic drugs into the CNS, ineffective tumor antigen presentation and the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, and the tremendous microheterogeneity even within individual tumors.