 Hi, I'm Nick Savarskan. I'm the head of the Translation and Neuro-Oncology Lab. We are located at the University of Erlangen-Nürnbeck in Germany. And I would like to introduce our paper, which was recently published at OnkoTarget, entitled Versatile X-Vivo Technique for Assaying Tumor, Angiogenesis and Microglue in Brain Tumors. So, basically what we did was to establish a technique in which we placed brain slices in cultures and implanted gliomas. Gliomas are brain tumors which grow destructive, infiltrative into brain tissue. And for those kind of tumors, we actually do not have any curative therapy, meaning patients suffering from gliomas have a median survival of nowadays 14.5 months, which is really disappointing, realizing that there is more than 40 years of intensive research on this type of tumors. So, what makes these tumors so specific and so hard to therapy? Well, first of all, we should keep in mind that it's not only the tumor which is part of the disease, it's also the microenvironment, meaning that these type of tumors are in particular able to modify their microenvironment and to modify and manipulate their environment in the way that the environment fires and fuels those tumor cells. Second, what those gliomas do is that they get attached to existing vessels and on top they are also able to generate own vessels, which is called then Neobasculature or Angiogenesis. So these two features in mind motivated us to establish a technique which allows us to study these tumors in their natural microenvironment and which allowed us to do this also in, let's say, not high through output, but in a way that we can generate high numbers to evaluate, for instance, new small molecules or whatsoever. So, just using then the classical syngenic animal models simply do not allow researchers studying tumor growth in vivo in a high number, just due to the fact that you would have to operate so many more animals and these would extend the study time in an unacceptable way. So the model we established is called Vascular-Glioma Impact Method or short abbreviated Vogen. And the good thing about this method is that you can generate multiple single experimental setups with just one brain tissue and this really accelerates the speed and the numbers of your experiments in a way that you are able to test then these type of tumors for multiple reagents, chemotherapeutic agents, combinations of therapeutic agents or even genetic approaches. So what is this method basically? The method includes the brain which is the natural environment of gliomas and then where you implant these tumors, the glioma cells and this also allows you now to implement tumor cells which you can stain before you implant these tumors into brain tissue or you can even genetically modify those tumors in a way researchers like to focus a certain pathway or to make them bioluminescent or expressing fluorescent proteins for monitoring these tumor cells in the brain tissue. The advantage of this technique is now that you are able to monitor tumor cells and in the same time you are able also to monitor the host cells and host cells means that within the brain tissue you have neurons, these are the functional units of the brain but you also have astrocytes which are also important cellular constituent of the brain making neurons even functional and you can also monitor oligodendrocytes, these cells are myelin producing cells wrapping up axons meaning the extension of neurons and very important in terms of tumor immunology the microglial cells microglial cells are immune competent cells of the brain and they normally are very aggressive against any foreign cell type invading or intruding the brain tissue. However when it comes to glioma cells these immune response mediated by microglial cells is compromised and with the Vodem technique we are now in the position to monitor all these host cells of the brain and their interaction with tumor cells and another advantage of the Vodem technique is that it allows researchers to do time lapse monitoring meaning you can now monitor the behavior of tumor cells over time in a real time procedure and the interaction with all these host cells of the brain meaning astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, neurons as well as microglial cells so what we did in our Onko Target paper was now first of all to monitor microglial cells in their interaction with glioma cells and secondly then we monitored tumor vessels how they get formed with which speed and what type of morphology they generate in comparison to the vasculature of normal brain tissue so the good thing within this Vodem system is that you are able to monitor your control brain slice with the tumor plant brain slice in the very same well and this is something you really like to have a really robust control which then makes your whole system also stable in analyzing those things and what we did in this Onko Target paper was also to use chemotherapeutic agent which is in the moment standard in the therapy of glioma cells and this is called Timozomalite, a drug which patients normally do accept quite well and which is also a drug which can reduce the speed of growth of glioma cells for a certain time as I said we do not have any cure against these type of tumors in the moment and we now worked out how Timozomalite now affects glioma cells in the Bulgems Essay and how Timozomalite also affects tumor vessels and all these procedures can be implemented in the Vodem system which allows you now to monitor your drug of interest or your molecule of interest in a in vivo like system in a way where you also can monitor a high number of brain slices in a very short time and all together these features of the Vodem are very much in favor of doing these experiments before you normally then enter in vivo essays by using then living animals with all the restrictions and especially in Germany and I think in general in the European Union we have to implement these three R concept which really makes it hard to apply for an animal experiment which is not well defined and which is also maybe let's say going into a fishing experiment way therefore the Vodem Essay is in this sense a very good method to even do a shot into the blue by using your molecules of interest and when you're gonna if you're gonna see effects in the system then this seems to be very robust then these findings are probably also very likely to be also monitored in an in vivo system