Neurobiology of Cancer

Boris Mravec was born in 1975 in Slovakia. In 2000 he graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of Comenius University in Bratislava. Subsequently, as part of his PhD studies at the Slovak Academy of Sciences under the supervision of RNDr. Richard Kvetnanský, DSc., was devoted to the research of central regulation of neuroendocrine stress response in the rat. During his PhD studies he completed several study visits in the laboratory of prof. MD. Miklos Palkovits, DSc., during which, among other things, he learned the method of rat and mouse brain microdissection. After defending his PhD degree in 2005, he joined the Institute of Pathological Physiology as a lecturer first and since 2014 he has been working at the Institute of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Comenius University. At the same time, he also works as a researcher at the Biomedical Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

Since 2005, together with his colleagues and PhD students, he has been researching the role of the nervous system in the tumor process in peripheral tissues. During this period, several publications related to this area of research were available. However, these papers mostly focused only on some aspects of the relationship between the nervous system and tumor. Most of the papers focused on investigating and describing the influence of the nervous system on the tumor; only a small number of papers dealt with the influence of the tumor on the nervous system. Thus, a more comprehensive and unifying concept describing the bidirectional relationships between the nervous system and tumor tissue was lacking. Therefore, in 2008, he and his colleagues published a comprehensive description of the role of the nervous system in cancer and introduced the term "cancer neurobiology" to the literature.

As he specialized in the study of brain structures regulating the neuroendocrine stress response as part of his PhD studies, the main goal of his further research activities was to elucidate, at least in part, the mechanisms mediating the adverse effects of stress on tumor initiation and progression in laboratory animals using approaches such as exposing animals to stressors, eliminating sympathetic nerve endings with the neurotoxin 6-hydroxydopamine, or decreasing adrenergic signaling by using the ß-blocker propranolol. Later, he also focused on the role of the parasympathetic nervous system when, in the framework of an international project led by Prof. Yori Gidron, he investigated the effect of chronic stimulation of the nervus vagus on the development of fibrosarcoma in rats. In addition, as tumor growth may also represent a specific stressor, he and his colleagues also focused on investigating changes in the activity of selected brain structures in animals with tumors growing in peripheral tissues. In addition to describing changes in brain activity in animals during tumor progression in different compartments of the body (e.g., intraperitoneally and subcutaneously), they also described the effect of tumor on brain structures involved in the regulation of various processes in the brain and periphery. Recently, the focus has been on validating the mechanisms of neuro-tumor interactions in clinical trials and on the application of the knowledge gained in the treatment of cancer patients.