- Glioblastoma is a form of brain cancer that has very low survivability rates.
- This is partly due to the fact that glioblastoma cancers evade detection by the immune system, and spread aggressively.
- Many recent improvements in cancer survivability rates are due to the use of immunotherapies, but it is difficult for these to cross the blood-brain barrier to treat brain cancer.
- Researchers have now created a gel that can be injected into the tumor cavity left following surgery. The gel, which contains immunotherapies to help the immune system to kill any remaining cancer cells, was tested in mice.
Though cancer death rates are improving overall, there are still some cancers that have poor survivability. One of those cancers is glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer that affects
Dr. Aung Bajaj, a medical oncologist and hematologist with Arizona Oncology, not involved in this study told Medical News Today that “glioblastoma multiforme is considered the most aggressive type of brain tumor, and patients who are diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme typically live around 1-2 years.”
“It is treated with surgical resection followed by a combination of radiation and chemotherapy. If the cancer is maximally resected, the prognosis tends to be better. However, maximum resection is not always possible due to its infiltrative properties, where glioblastoma multiforme coexists with normal brain tissue, and extensive surgery for complete removal could compromise a patient’s neurologic function,” he noted.
Getting chemotherapies into the brain is challenging because of the blood-brain barrier, which prevents molecules over a certain size from reaching the brain.
One form of therapy given for glioblastoma is Gliadel wafers, which are small patches that slowly release a form of chemotherapy into the cavity left behind by the surgery, bypassing the problem posed by the blood-brain barrier.
Immunotherapies have greatly improved cancer survival…
Read the full article here