Dr. Razis on Molecular Targeting of Glioblastoma

Evangelia Razis, MD, PhD, medical oncologist, Hygeia Hospital, Athens, Greece, discusses the importance of molecular targeting for patients with glioblastoma.

Razis says glioblastoma is a disease that generally has a poor prognosis. Recent work has been done to investigate the molecular features of the tumors to see if something specific can be targeted, in the hopes of developing more effective treatments. In 2017, she says, the World Health Organization issued a new classification of brain tumors, which was due in large part to the new molecular markers.

Additionally, Razis was part of a study that took tissue from 101 patients with brain cancer and used next-generation sequencing to test for IDH1, TERT and p53 mutations. Findings from this trial were presented at the 2018 ASCO Annual Meeting, which showed that TERT mutations have less significance when NF1 mutations are present.