This year has been extremely productive for neuroscientist Dr Urtė Neniškytė: she has just been announced a member of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence, she has already published important scientific research, and a few days ago, she congratulated her PhD student on defending her thesis. “It is of great importance for me to represent Lithuania, Lithuania’s neurosciences, and show that they are being successfully developed in our country,” she says.
On the 4th of September, it was announced that Dr Urtė Neniškytė has been selected to become a member of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence. It is a network of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) and the Kavli Foundation joining young and mid-career neuroscientists. The aim of this network is to unite European researchers, to promote cross-country cooperation and engagement in policy-making. Highly distinguished researchers whose contribution is important not only nationally but also internationally are invited to join the network. Therefore, it is truly great that for the first time a neuroscientist from Lithuania has been invited this year.
Active participation in communicating with public is also important for FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence, and this is nothing new for Dr Neniškytė as she is one of the most recognizable researchers in society and an active communicator of neuroscience.
We spoke with the researcher about the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence, her latest research and tips for brain efficiency.
Q: We often hear discussions that Lithuanian science lacks internationality. Am I right in thinking that your membership in the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence will bring that internationality to Lithuania?
A: Yes, it is very important for me to represent Lithuania, Lithuanian neurosciences, and show that they are successfully developed in our country. Although all the researchers could nominate themselves for the membership in the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence, I am glad that I was nominated by the Lithuanian Neuroscience Association. I think it was an important contribution to the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence Council’s decision to select me. The competition is quite big. If I am not mistaken, there were over a 100 applicants this year, and only 15 researchers were selected.
Q: Communication with the public is important for FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence. You are already an active communicator. Does this membership mean that you will be doing it more often?
A: I think my experience in communication was one of the reasons why I was selected for this network, because this is an important area of the network’s activity. When submitting the application, we had to propose two initiatives that we would like to join or that we would like the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence to start.
I proposed to expand the application of neuroscientific knowledge in education in order to achieve more efficient teaching and learning. It is an especially interesting topic for me. I’d like to see more cooperation between neuroscientists and educators to provide current and future teachers with more knowledge about how our brain learns and how to choose the most effective teaching/learning methods. It is becoming extremely important as we talk more and more about inclusive education.
The second initiative I proposed is related to the careers of researchers and their assessment. That is, how we evaluate a person to be a successful scientist. If we focus solely on articles and projects, we greatly limit the activities that are worth spending time on as a researcher. However, we want scientists to communicate with society, to train young researchers, to participate in policy-making etc., don’t we? There are several initiatives in the world related to how we evaluate researchers. One of them is the Declaration on Research Assessment or DORA, which was supported by the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence. The COARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment) initiative, of which Vilnius University is also a member, was recently launched. I think that the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence should also become a member of this initiative.
Q: When announcing the decision of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence, it is always emphasized that only exceptional researchers join this network, and it is a great honour for every university or research centre to have a scientist belonging to the network. Were you happy when you received the news of becoming a member?
A: It was really great, I felt very happy. It is a twice-a-year opportunity to meet the best of the best. It will provide unique opportunities to develop my research. I will be able to work with researchers of very different experiences and competences, we will discuss, find things in common, interests that relate. I believe it will be useful both for my research group, for the Department of Neurobiology and Biophysics of Vilnius University, and for the development of Lithuania’s neurosciences.
Q: It will be very interesting to watch what will happen during your term. I hope you will share the news. Now I would like to talk about your latest research. In June, an important publication appeared, written by you and your colleagues concerning glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive and difficult to diagnose forms of brain cancer. Before we start talking more about the research itself, tell us why you chose this particular tumour?
A: Our group’s research is mostly related to brain development. This study seems to drop out of the context of what we are working with, but the reason was practical. In our laboratory, we wanted to implement methodologies for organotypic cultures, which are prepared from surgically removed human brain tissues. Such surgeries can be performed to treat, for example, brain cancer or drug-resistant epilepsy. During such operations, the removed tissue is simply disposed of as medical waste. However, with patient’s permission, such a tissue could be used for research. It is human tissue and therefore it is a unique material that provides an opportunity to directly evaluate the biochemical processes of the human brain.
We have received permission from the Lithuanian Bioethics Committee, and patients and patient representatives are very positive, they usually agree to hand over their tissues to researchers after the surgery. However, this is only one stage, to get the tissue itself.
The second, no less important, stage is tissue preparation, so we were looking for someone who could teach us the necessary techniques. My former PhD student Ugnė Kuliešiūtė, who defended her thesis on the 2nd of September and received a doctoral degree, found a group at the University of Freiburg (Germany). This group studies mechanisms of glioblastoma. Therefore, we chose a project that would be relevant to both the German researchers and us.
Researchers at the University of Freiburg are studying glioblastoma tissue, and one of our group’s research areas is the neuronal glycocalyx, the sugar coating that covers each cell. Thus, we decided to evaluate the role of the glycocalyx in the interaction of neurons with other brain cells, and how this affects the development of glioblastoma in a joint project.
In a couple of months, we realized that we have come upon something truly interesting. Scientific research often compliments and expands the existing knowledge, and in this case, we discovered something that no one had studied or known before. We found that glioblastoma tumour growth and integration into brain neural network directly depend on the properties of glycocalyx. By changing the glycocalyx we can limit the spread of glioblastoma cells.
Q: What does your discovery mean; can it contribute to better treatment of glioblastoma in the future?
A: Our findings may be relevant to the development of new treatment therapies. Glioblastoma is usually treated surgically removing the tumour followed by chemotherapy. Using human organotypic cultures, we discovered that by modifying the sugar coating of cells we could change the growth of tumour.
In order to create a model of glioblastoma in a lab dish, Ugnė injected glioblastoma cells isolated from patients into a small piece of human cerebral cortex, thus forming a tiny tumour. By modifying the glycocalyx, she observed the tumour change.
We found that restricting glycocalyx formation keeps the tumour small and dense. It would not be a sufficient treatment method but could potentially be developed as a pre-surgical therapy. If the tumour is small and localized, its removal becomes much easier.
When the sugar coating is actively developing, the tumour grows very widely forming various branches. Inevitably, while removing such a tumour, a lot of healthy tissue should also be removed. And the brain does not regrow that is why neurosurgeons try to remove the entire tumour saving as much healthy tissue as possible.
What is more important, perhaps from the basic research point of view: why does the sugar coating lead to different growth of tumour? Over the past few years, researchers studying glioblastoma have found that tumour cells form synapses with neurons. It is theses synapses that are important for the tumour to grow further. If the development of such synapses is disrupted, the spread of glioblastoma is limited.
We found that preventing the sugar coating from forming prevents the glioblastoma cell network from forming. Thus, the integration of cancer cells into the tissue becomes limited. We observed this both in single cell cultures and in a glioblastoma model in human brain tissue.
These results and the highly potent effects of glycocalyx modification on glioblastoma cell properties are novel and important in the quest to overcome the most aggressive form of brain cancer.
When we submitted the article, both the journal editors and reviewers were very interested. Although it took some work to answer all the detailed questions, we can see that the research community has accepted the article very openly. We hope that it will make a significant contribution to further glioblastoma research.
Q: Will you continue these studies; have you already passed the results on to researchers in the world?
A: We will continue some of the research. We next raise the question of how the mixed network of cancer cells and neurons is formed, and Ugnė will move her career abroad for the time being, for a post-doctoral internship. She is also “taking this issue” with her, thinking of supplementing it with new methods that we have not yet had in Lithuania. For example, combining her expertise in studying sugar coating with brain organoid technology: it is like a mini brain grown in a dish.
Q: You mentioned your former PhD student Ugnė Kuliešiūtė, with whom you published research together. When and why in your career did you decide not only to do research but also share your experience with future or young researchers?
A: The mentoring comes to a scientist’s life very early. Sometimes already in the master’s years students help undergraduates with their research.
I started supervising my first BSc students as a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. During my postdoctoral internship, I had more students, often more than one at a time. When I returned to Lithuania, to Vilnius University, it was obvious that, when creating my research group, I inevitably needed doctoral students with more experience, who could plan and carry out their research project quite independently with my help.
The first doctoral students joined in 2018, Ugnė Kuliešiūtė in 2019, and she became the first to defend her thesis. So this year has been rich in research papers for me, and next year will be rich in PhD students who are now writing their dissertations. I am very pleased to pass on my experience and raise another PhDs.
Q: They are lucky to have such a mentor! Now, a question relevant to probably everyone. How to keep one’s brain healthy? What do you do yourself?
A: You know, I don’t do a lot of things that I should do (laughs). Maybe I’m not so much concerned with my brain health as I am with the efficient use of it. I really put a conscious effort into it. The principle of division is useful for me: at work, there is work and at home, there is home. It helps me focus when I need it most. I try to limit external distractions as much as possible. If you’re doing something that requires concentration, how many messages do you get? How many times do you check, how many times do you reply? Each such diversion reduces your efficiency by up to 30 percent.
I used to have one day a week dedicated to writing articles or project proposals. These tasks require a lot of concentration, because it is necessary to transfer a lot of information to the working memory. If I tried to do other things at the same time, I had to repeat this transfer again and again. So I had a day when my email was turned off, when the lab new it was my day when I was unavailable for routine questions. Of course, in emergency cases, I could be reached by phone but such cases almost never happened. So there was no distracting context throughout the day and it really helped.
Since summer has just ended, I have to say that holidays are also very important. I’ve noticed before that after holidays I come back with new ideas, a different point of view. It’s very easy to follow the same track once you’ve found it, while science inevitably requires to look at it from an unexpected angle sometimes.
Q: Thank you for the conversation!
A: Thank you.