Dimensions of a Tumor:Organization and evolution of adult-type diffuse glioma

This work examines diffuse adult type gliomas – primary brain tumors – in its many dimensions. The scope is broad, encompassing comprehensive questions on how gliomas organize in space and evolve over time. When I started working on this thesis, single cell and spatial transcriptomics were new and we were keen to include these methods in our work, besides classic bulk characterization, to tackle these large questions. Nowadays, high dimensional methods are routinely used to characterize malignancies and the context in which we study these data is diversifying, with measurements from whole tumor, tissue regions, single cell and even from a subcellular level. The increasing complexity and high dimensional character of these biological data tends to draw its analyses and results into abstract spaces, which can make it challenging to relate it to tumor biology at times. While working on this thesis, I often felt tempted to be as comprehensive as possible in including data, techniques and analyses, to exhaust all the information captured by these powerful methods. At certain points, this seemed to become an end rather than a means. In the end, I am confident that this work increases our understanding of clear biological phenomena that can be of consequence to future patient care. Continued high-dimensional scrutiny of tumors can be a great resource to cancer research, if the “end” is a clear, biologically motivated question.