Recent Approaches and Novel Therapeutic Targets in Human Glioma

Malignant gliomas are highly invasive primary brain tumors that are not known to metastasize outside the central nervous system (CNS). The median survival time of patients with glioma is only 6 months to 2 years depending on the variability in patient’s condition, type of tumor and variable treatment parameters. In recent times, Gamma knife (GK) and temozolomide (TMZ) have showed a new dimension for the treatment of gliomas, even these modalities have not able to bring a paradigm shift in overall survival and morbidity. Despite the aggressive current therapeutic interventions such as surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, improved therapeutic strategies/targets are greatly needed. Interactions between the tumor and its microenvironment are known to regulate malignancies and there is need to focus more research on these pathways in order to develop more reliable therapeutic strategies for the treatment of gliomas. It has also been shown that drug transporters are highly expressed by small population of most type of tumors, providing for a level of resistance which are relatively quiescent and show higher level of DNA repair, and a lowered ability to enter the apoptosis; can provide another therapeutic targets in most of the cancer types including gliomas. The alteration of miRNA expression profile in glioma has also been found to be associated with neoplastic agents, hence open a new direction for the treatment. Therefore, the present review has been focused on some of these new potential targets for therapeutic interventions in the prognosis and treatment of human glioma.