If you know which virus has made a person ill, as well as whether your patient responds better to drug A or drug B, you're in a much better position to treat them. In the world of oncology, it's often the genetic personality of the tumor itself that determines the best treatment protocol. A tumor with one set of gene variants may be susceptible to only one of several treatments. To decide which drug to prescribe, you've got to know your tumor.
In some cancers, such as skin cancer, it's easy to physically examine the tumor and easy to take a biopsy to root out the tumor's genetic secrets. But for cancers deep in the brain, a biopsy is problematic. And without knowing more about a brain tumor, it's harder to guess the right treatment.
Now a team of researchers, led by Stanford's Haruka Itakura, MD, and Olivier Gevaert, PhD, have distinguished three types of brain tumors. Each type is identifiable by their appearance in MRIs and predictably associated with specific molecular characteristics. Itakura and Gevaert report their work in today's Science Translational Medicine.
Magnetic resonance imaging revealed three distinct kinds of glioblastoma brain tumors, each of which could be associated with a different probability of patient survival and a unique set of molecular signaling pathways. The work paves the way for more precise diagnosis, better targeted therapies and personalized treatment of GBM brain tumors.
Previously: Brain imaging, and the "image management" cells that make it possible, A century of brain imaging and When it comes to brain imaging, there's nothing simple about it
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