Personalized Medicine in Brain Gliomas: Targeted Therapy, Patient-Derived Tumor Models (Review)

TL;DR

This review discusses how personalized medicine and patient-derived tumor models can improve brain glioma treatment by targeting specific molecular mechanisms.

Contribution

The paper highlights the novel use of patient-derived tumor models for drug screening in personalized glioma therapy.

Findings

Personalized targeted therapies show higher efficacy than standard treatments for brain gliomas.

Patient-derived tumor models are promising for predicting drug effectiveness in individual patients.

Molecular and genetic mechanisms of gliomas can be targeted to inhibit tumor growth.

Abstract

Gliomas are the most common type of primary malignant brain tumors. The choice of treatments for these tumors was quite limited for many years, and therapy results generally remain still unsatisfactory. Recently, a significant breakthrough in the treatment of many forms of cancer occurred when personalized targeted therapies were introduced which inhibit tumor growth by affecting a specific molecular target. Another trend gaining popularity in oncology is the creation of patient-derived tumor models which can be used for drug screening to select the optimal therapy regimen.

Molecular and genetic mechanisms of brain gliomas growth are considered, consisting of individual components which could potentially be exposed to targeted drugs. The results of the literature review show a higher efficacy of the personalized approach to the treatment of individual patients compared to the use of standard therapies. However, many unresolved issues remain in the area of predicting the effectiveness of a particular drug therapy regimen. The main hopes in solving this issue are set on the use of patient-derived tumor models, which can be used in one-stage testing of a wide range of antitumor drugs.

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