Comment: Scientists discover how to better map brain tumours

Prof Charles Swanton - Cancer Research UK's London Research Institute, London, UK

What do you make of the study from Sibson?

I think it’s very exciting. One of the big problems with brain tumours, as you know, is mapping their invasive edge can be quite diffuse, quite difficult to identify, as I understand it, surgically. Efforts to be able to image these tumours in greater detail and map their invasive fronts are going to be critically important. What this group have nicely and elegantly shown is they’ve got specific approaches now to label the blood vessels that surround these tumours to be able to image them more effectively and that’s going to help define surgical margins, they’re going to help the surgical approach become more efficient, I hope. So, yes, these are animal studies at the moment but ready for prime time and an introduction into clinical trials in patients hopefully. So I think it’s an extremely exciting article and hopefully I look forward to seeing more developments in this area.