The 2025 Brain Prize has gone to two researchers who used mice in their ‘revolutionary’ research linking the brain and cancer.
Frank Winkler, Professor for Neuro-Oncology at Heidelberg University – an EARA member – and Michelle Monje, of Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA, received the prestigious prize, awarded by the Lundbeck Foundation, for pioneering a completely new field in brain research called cancer neuroscience.
The pair discovered, in separate research, that tumour cells and neurons in the brain can interact with each other in a way that promotes the growth, spread and resistance to treatment of often fatal brain tumours, called gliomas.
Previously, it was thought that gliomas grow and behave as a separate entity to the brain, but Monje and Winkler’s research revealed that the tumours in fact hijack brain circuits and form connections with neurons in order to exploit the brain’s electrical activity and signalling to survive and spread (metastasis).
Mice were involved in several studies leading to these findings, including to confirm the effect of a new therapeutic target to impair glioma growth, which led to clinical trials, and to show that blocking electrical activity reduced growth and extended survival.
Mice were also used to study the role of specific structures in the tumour that help it resist therapy.
In the prize announcement video, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, chair of the Brain Prize selection committee, said: “That’s really a new way to think about both the brain and cancer, and points directly to new treatments. So this altogether is a nice package that got us all quite excited.”