Brown Researchers Uncover Key to Glioblastoma Treatment

Study reveals how differences among cells within a single tumor influence cancer's response to chemotherapy

Published on Jan. 31, 2026

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A groundbreaking study from Brown University Health researchers has identified a crucial factor that may help improve treatment for glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive and common forms of adult brain cancer. The findings reveal how differences among cells within a single tumor influence the cancer's response to chemotherapy, and introduce a promising new therapy designed to tip the odds in the patients' favor.

Why it matters

Glioblastoma is notoriously difficult to treat, in part because no two cells within the tumor behave exactly alike. Even inside one tumor, some cells may respond to treatment while others resist it, allowing the cancer to persist and grow. This study helps explain why tumors maintain so much internal variability and opens the door to gene-therapy strategies that could be truly game-changing for many glioblastoma patients.

The details

The research team discovered that a small molecule called miR-181d acts like a master switch that helps control how much of a DNA-repair protein called MGMT each glioblastoma cell produces. MGMT is crucial because it allows cancer cells to fix the damage caused by chemotherapy, making them harder to kill. The problem is that not all tumor cells make the same amount of MGMT, some produce a lot, while others make very little. This uneven production means that while some cells die during treatment, others survive to fuel tumor growth. The researchers found that administering miR-181d into the tumor can reduce this effect, making the cancer cells behave more uniformly, and importantly, more likely to respond to chemotherapy.

  • The findings were published on November 10, 2026 in Cell Reports.

The players

Clark Chen

Professor and director of the brain tumor program, department of neurosurgery at Brown University Health, and senior author of the study.

Gatikrushna Singh

Assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Minnesota and a key collaborator on the study.

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What they’re saying

“Traditionally, researchers have focused on the overall behavior of a tumor by studying the average response across all the individual cells, using differences between the cells to interpret the average. Our study fundamentally flipped that approach. Rather than focusing on the average response, we focused on the differences between individual cells within the same tumor, and what we found could change how we treat glioblastoma.”

— Clark Chen, Professor and director of the brain tumor program, department of neurosurgery at Brown University Health (Mirage News)

“This is an exciting step forward. Scientifically, it helps explain why tumors maintain so much internal variability. Clinically, it opens the door to gene-therapy strategies that could be truly game-changing for many glioblastoma patients.”

— Gatikrushna Singh, Assistant professor of neurosurgery, University of Minnesota (Mirage News)

What’s next

The discovery has already led to the development of a new potential therapy aimed at improving patients' responses to chemotherapy by stabilizing miR-181d levels within the tumor.

The takeaway

This study helps explain the longstanding challenge of glioblastoma treatment - the internal variability of tumor cells - and introduces a promising new approach that could make chemotherapy more effective by targeting a key molecular switch that controls this variability.