Heads Up

Heads Up stands as a symbol of resilience, strength, and hope—a light breaking through the darkness. Born from Luka’s story, it is my way of supporting those who face similar battles. The foundation’s mission is to advance research into the diagnosis and treatment of brain tumors, focusing initially on children and now extending its support to adults.

Dose Painting

Key projects supported by Heads Up focus on innovative techniques to improve treatments. One such breakthrough is dose painting, which delivers higher, targeted radiation doses to the most active areas of a tumor, guided by the FET signal on PET scans.

Motility Trapping

Another promising area of research is motility trapping, which aims to halt the movement of invasive cancer cells. By effectively immobilizing these cells, this technique seeks to prevent the tumor from spreading further, offering new possibilities for containment and treatment.

High grade glioma (HGG) is the most frequent primary brain tumor, affecting both adults and children. To date, no curative treatment exists and eventually tumor progression inevitably occurs, leading to devastating symptoms and death. Tumor cell motility is an important, yet too little investigated factor in therapy failure.

Glioma cells migrate outside the visible tumor margins, sometimes even to distant locations within the brain. These tumoral cellsfollow concentration gradients of specific chemical substances or‘chemoattractants’.

Migratory glioma cells ‘shelter’ within normal functional tissue,were they cannot be targeted by local therapy (surgery orradiotherapy). To kill these migrated cells, we have to rely onchemotherapy. However, this is hindered by the blood-brain barrierand is associated with serious side-effects.

Motility trapping aims to target the migratory glioma cells andconsist of two consecutive phases:

In phase 1, a tumor trap is placed in the resection cavity aftertumor surgery. This trap delivers chemoattractants to misleadglioma cells, that shelter in normal brain, back to the original tumorlocation.

In phase 2, these attracted tumor cells, no longer sheltered bynormal functional brain, are targeted with local therapy (secondsurgery and/or radiotherapy).

In summary, tumor cells are attracted to be killed.