Biodiversity as a barrier to glioma cell invasion

Gliomas are extremely aggressive and lethal forms of brain cancer. Unlike many other cancer types, glioma cells rarely metastasize. They spread throughout the brain and invasiveness of glioma cells is a major cause of therapeutic failure. In plant ecosystem, biodiversity acts locally as a barrier to ecological invasion. By analogy, we hypothesize that the low cell diversity of differentiated tissues, a counterpart of their functional specificity, opens the way to local cancer cell invasion. Seeding the brain tumor microenvironment with heterogeneous cell populations could be a mean to limit cancer cell invasion by enhancing cell biodiversity.