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Glioblastoma is one of the deadliest tumours, with very low survival rate and no efficient therapies available.
The current gold standards of management, namely surgery, chemo- and radiotherapy, have little effectiveness since these tumours typically exhibit very aggressive recurrences within a short time frame. In spite of concerted international efforts over the past few decades, an effective treatment for these tumours has remained elusive.
However, scientists recently reported promising results which demonstrated that the technique of gene therapy could potentially give hope in the fight against glioblastomas. In this study, the team focused on introducing an additional copy of a specific gene into the tumour cells. What is remarkable here is that this would then, in turn, lead to subsequent impairment of the reproductive capacity of these cells and eventually result in cellular suicide.
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Notably, the inspiration that sparked this study came about after years of study on one gene called Emx2. A key characteristic of this gene is that it is able to work during embryonic growth to inhibit astrocyte proliferation.
Read full, original post: Glioblastoma – Can Gene Therapy Really Help?
