Update on glioma treatments in the United States

Abstract

Despite the use of maximal standard treatments, the prognosis of patients with glioblastoma remains poor; hence novel therapies are desperately needed. Molecular targeted therapies have shown some promise in other malignancies, while they have not demonstrated remarkable tumor response or improved patient survival in glio-blastoma to date, due, in part, to the redundancy and crosstalk of multiple overactive molecular pathways and the lack of validated predictive biomarkers. At present, a comprehensive cancer genotyping platform that can reveal potentially targetable genes is being implemented into clinical practice at some cancer institutions in the United States. This may allow us to rationally tailor therapies to specific tumor genotypes that we predict may be susceptible. In this paper, an overview of current glioblastoma treatment strategies in the United States is presented.