History
The Brain Tumor Center at UC San Francisco was established as an environment where bidirectional communication between scientists and physicians could flourish and drive advances in the treatment of brain tumors.
Building on the collaborative culture within the neurosurgery department at UCSF, neurosurgeon Charles Wilson, MD, developed a multidisciplinary program that became known as one of the country’s earliest examples of translational research.
“One of the joys of the whole culture at UCSF [is] it’s absolute open movement between basic science and clinical science.”
Research from investigators in the Brain Tumor Center led to discoveries that identified the first brain tumor therapies. In 1968, when Wilson first arrived at UCSF, he and vice chair of neurosurgery Edwin Boldrey, MD, launched a chemotherapy program that began enrolling patients with recurrent high-grade gliomas into clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of several different drugs. At the same time, scientists began using cell culture models of brain tumors to study their biology and to assess the toxicity of potential anticancer drugs in the lab. By 1976, Brain Tumor Center researchers had demonstrated that procarbazine, lomustine (CCNU), and vincristine was an effective combination chemotherapy. This chemotherapy regimen, often abbreviated as PCV, is still used to treat malignant glioma.
The close collaboration with surgeons also led to the creation of the Neurosurgery Biorepository in 1978, which began collecting tumor samples from patients. As one of the largest biorepositories of brain tumor tissue for research, this resource continues helping investigators at the Brain Tumor Center ask fundamental questions about how different types of tumors arise in the brain and respond to therapy.
In 1979, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded the Brain Tumor Center its first Program Project Grant to support multiple research projects aiming to better understand the biology of brain tumors. This award, which has been continuously funded through multiple competitive cycles, has since evolved to focus on developing noninvasive neuroimaging techniques to identify biomarkers of tumor response and disease progression. UCSF researchers were one of the first groups to use hyperpolarized carbon-13 imaging in patients to assess tumor burden and response to treatment by tracking changes in their tumors’ metabolism.
The completion of the NIH’s Human Genome Project in 2001 prompted scientists to begin analyzing the molecular and genetic features characteristic of different types of tumors. In 2015, researchers at UCSF developed the UCSF500 Cancer Gene Panel, a genetic sequencing test that looks for DNA mutations in 500 cancer-associated genes. These investigations demonstrated the importance of molecular profiling in diagnosing brain tumors, predicting patients’ prognosis, and developing novel therapies targeting specific mutations.