Malignant gliomas are highly invasive tumors with an almost invariably rapid and lethal outcome. Surgery and chemoradiotherapy fail to remove resistant tumor cells that disperse within normal tissue, which are a major cause for disease progression and therapy failure. Infiltration of the neural parenchyma is a distinctive property of malignant gliomas compared to other solid tumors. Thus, glioma cells are thought to produce unique molecular changes that remodel the neural extracellular matrix and form a microenvironment permissive for their motility. Here we describe the unique expression and pro-invasive role of fibulin-3, a mesenchymal matrix protein specifically upregulated in gliomas. Fibulin-3 is downregulated in peripheral tumors and thought to inhibit tumor growth. However, we found fibulin-3 highly upregulated in gliomas and cultured glioma cells, although the protein was undetectable in normal brain or cultured astrocytes. Overexpression and knockdown experiments revealed that fibulin-3 did not seem to affect glioma cell morphology or proliferation, but enhanced substrate-specific cell adhesion and promoted cell motility and dispersion in organotypic cultures. Moreover, orthotopic implantation of fibulin-3-overexpressing glioma cells resulted in diffuse tumors with increased volume and rostrocaudal extension compared to controls. Tumors and cultured cells overexpressing fibulin-3 also showed elevated expression and activity of matrix metalloproteases, such as MMP-2/9 and ADAMTS-5. Taken together, our results suggest that fibulin-3 has a unique expression and pro-tumoral role in gliomas, and could be a potential target against tumor progression. Strategies against this glioma-specific matrix component could disrupt invasive mechanisms and restrict dissemination of these tumors.

Malignant gliomas are the most common tumors originating within the central nervous system and account for over 15,000 deaths annually in the United States. The median survival for glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive of these tumors, is only 14 months. Therapeutic strategies targeting glioma cells migrating away from the tumor core are currently hampered by the difficulty of reproducing migration in the neural parenchyma in vitro. We utilized a tissue engineering approach to develop a physiologically relevant model of glioma cell migration. This revealed that glioma cells display dramatic differences in migration when challenged by random versus aligned electrospun poly-epsilon-caprolactone nanofibers. Cells on aligned fibers migrated at an effective velocity of 4.2 +/- 0.39 microm/h compared to 0.8 +/- 0.08 microm/h on random fibers, closely matching in vivo models and prior observations of glioma spread in white versus gray matter. Cells on random fibers exhibited extension along multiple fiber axes that prevented net motion; aligned fibers promoted a fusiform morphology better suited to infiltration. Time-lapse microscopy revealed that the motion of individual cells was complex and was influenced by cell cycle and local topography. Glioma stem cell-containing neurospheres seeded on random fibers did not show cell detachment and retained their original shape; on aligned fibers, cells detached and migrated in the fiber direction over a distance sixfold greater than the perpendicular direction. This chemically and physically flexible model allows time-lapse analysis of glioma cell migration while recapitulating in vivo cell morphology, potentially allowing identification of physiological mediators and pharmacological inhibitors of invasion.