Brain-wide neuronal circuit connectome of human glioblastoma

Abstract

Glioblastoma (GBM), a universally fatal brain cancer, infiltrates the brain and can be synaptically innervated by neurons, which drives tumor progression ^1-6 . Synaptic inputs onto GBM cells identified so far are largely short-range and glutamatergic ^7-9 . The extent of integration of GBM cells into brain-wide neuronal circuitry is not well understood. Here we applied a rabies virus-mediated retrograde monosynaptic tracing approach ^10-12 to systematically investigate circuit integration of human GBM organoids transplanted into adult mice. We found that GBM cells from multiple patients rapidly integrated into brain-wide neuronal circuits and exhibited diverse local and long-range connectivity. Beyond glutamatergic inputs, we identified a variety of neuromodulatory inputs across the brain, including cholinergic inputs from the basal forebrain. Acute acetylcholine stimulation induced sustained calcium oscillations and long-lasting transcriptional reprogramming of GBM cells into a more invasive state via the metabotropic CHRM3 receptor. CHRM3 downregulation suppressed GBM cell invasion, proliferation, and survival in vitro and in vivo. Together, these results reveal the capacity of human GBM cells to rapidly and robustly integrate into anatomically and molecularly diverse neuronal circuitry in the adult brain and support a model wherein rapid synapse formation onto GBM cells and transient activation of upstream neurons may lead to a long-lasting increase in fitness to promote tumor infiltration and progression.