The FDA has approved the first drug, vorasidenib for patients with Grade 2 astrocytoma or oligodendroglioma with a susceptible IDH1 or IDH2 mutation. It is also the first drug approved for low grade gliomas in more than 20 years. Notably, the drug will allow more patients to delay the need…

Despite extensive research into the genomic anomalies of glioblastoma (GBM) over the past decade, the five-year survival rate remains under five percent. To address this, researchers led by a team of proteogenomic experts from Washington University studied high-grade gliomas—which includes both IDH-wildtype GBM and IDH-mutant grade 4 astrocytoma—using various molecular…

A new treatment that combines a personalized dendritic cell vaccine with the immune-boosting substance poly-ICLC has been shown to enhance the immune response and activity of T cells in patients with malignant glioma. The addition of poly-ICLC improves dendritic cells’ ability to treat the brain tumor than the vaccine alone,…

Collaborating researchers led by a team at Hokkaido University, Japan, have developed a non-destructive cancer grade probing system (GPS) that uses a water-soluble, luminescent europium (EuIII) complex to evaluate the malignancy grade of model glioma tumor cells. The team hopes that their method could lead to development of non-invasive tests…

A CNS tumor diagnosis is one of the grimmest you can receive, can artificial intelligence turn this around? Can radiologists learn to use such tools to more rapidly and accurately diagnose these tumors? Do the tools offer the information they need? Do they trust them? Do the tools actually improve…

BRAF mutated pediatric gliomas respond better to combination targeted therapy than chemotherapy, data just published in The New England Journal of Medicine affirms. The researchers found combination targeted therapy lessened chemotherapy side effects, improved overall response rate by more than four-fold, and increased median progression free survival from 7.4 months…

Adult patients with advanced midline gliomas have been treated with a peptide vaccine for the first time, according to researchers from Heidelberg and Mannheim, Germany. The vaccine mimicked a mutational change in a histone protein (H3K27M) that is a marker for this difficult-to-treat type of brain tumor. The vaccine proved…

Investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, reporting in the journal Science Translational Medicine, reported that they have developed a microdevice that can help test treatments for glioma, a form of cancer that originates in the spinal chord or brain. The researcher say that the device, which is roughly the same…

A candidate therapy being developed by U.S. biotech Chimerix shows good survival in patients with a specific type of glioma brain cancer in early clinical trials. The treatment, ONC201 or dordaviprone, binds to the G-protein coupled dopamine receptor D2 and the mitochondrial protease ClpP. Initial trials in glioblastoma (a type…

Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine looking for clues to the drivers of epileptic seizures in glioma patients have found that their tumors can interfere with the ability of surrounding neurons to handle potassium, an important ion in neuronal communication. Their findings, reported in the journal Neuron, provide important new…

A team of scientists at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center has identified a protein called ZMYND8 that boosts the resistance of some types of glioma to radiotherapy. Blocking the gene could lead to treatments that make radiotherapies more effective. Glioma is one of the deadliest types of cancers,…

Researchers at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center report a mutated gene affects the growth of glioma brain tumor cells in young adults, indicating sensitivity to a new treatment strategy. Glioma is a common type of tumor originating in the brain. About 33% of all brain tumors are gliomas,…

The flip of a single amino acid from arginine to histidine in a subset of these brain and nervous system tumors sets off a series of changes that, it turns out, sensitizes them to treatment with immune-stimulating therapy, to which they would otherwise be largely resistant according to new research…

An enhanced liquid biopsy test developed by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has shown improved sensitivity for detecting specific biomarkers in gliomas that shows significant promising in both detecting and monitoring treatments for this deadly form of cancer. By comparing blood samples from patients with gliomas with tumor biopsy…

Chemoresistance is one of the major causes of relapse as well as poor survival in patients gliomas. Today, 40–50% of patients are intrinsically resistant to temozolomide, the primary therapeutic agent used—in conjunction with radiotherapy—to treat these forms of brain tumors. However, a recent study carried out by the Spanish National…