Glioma Diagnosis and Treatment

Gliomas are tumors arising from the glial cells of the brain, and their most aggressive form, glioblastoma, carries a median survival of roughly fifteen months even with the current standard of care combining surgery, radiotherapy, and the chemotherapy agent temozolomide. Over the past two decades, molecular profiling has transformed how these tumors are classified: mutations in the IDH gene and methylation of the MGMT promoter, for instance, now predict both prognosis and how well a patient is likely to respond to treatment, shifting diagnosis from purely anatomical to genetic. Researchers are working to understand why certain gliomas, like medulloblastoma in children, follow distinct molecular subtypes with very different outcomes, and how the broader epidemiological patterns of brain tumor incidence relate to underlying genetic risk factors. A central open question is whether immunotherapy, so far only modestly effective in neuro-oncology, can be made to work in a tumor microenvironment that is unusually resistant to immune attack.

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Keywords

GlioblastomaTemozolomideIDH MutationRadiotherapyMolecular ClassificationMGMT Promoter Methylation