Glioblastomas

What is a glioblastoma?
A glioblastoma is a dangerous brain tumor that spreads rapidly throughout
the human brain. These tumors are rare and can also be found as spine tumors
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So what makes a glioblastoma spread so quickly?
This is because astrocytes a type of brain cell helps control the amount of blood that can get to them which helps the cells grow and spread quickly. An astrocyte as stated before is a type of brain cell they are involved in controlling blood brain barrier permeability and maintaining extacellular homeostasis in other words to maintain tissue level.

Treatment
Glioblastomas are rare and difficult to treat one of the reasons being how they spread and another being how often they reappear. This is because of a large amount of cells in the tumor called GSC- Glioma Stem Cells. This is a self-regenerating cancer stem cell controlling the tumor’s growth. Another thing that makes this tumor so bad is it’s shape, it’s star shaped which makes it very hard to remove surgically.

A team researching glioblastomas have discovered that the cells contain high levels of something called CDK5. They have also discovered that by blocking CDK5 that it can stop glioblastomas from growing. The gene that produces CDK5 making the tumor’s size smaller as well as the number of GSCs. What other things that can help get rid of this tumor? In some cases surgery is an option the objective is to get rid of as much of the tumor as possible. Glioblastomas can’t be completely removed because it develops into normal brain tissue. Which means after surgery further treatment is needed.

A treatment for glioblastomas is temozolomide. Temozolomide is a chemotherapy drug that is
showing improvement to patients with high grade brain tumors like glioblastomas when given
alongside with radiotherapy. The amount of TMZ-temozolomide taken is decided by a doctor
based on weight and height. This is a pill taken on an empty stomach. a typical treatment would
be up to 6 weeks of radiation combined with TMZ given orally every day. It's best if taken at the
same time daily.
Glioblastomas are very hard to treat and can be terrifying to patients who get it. There's a lot of
treatments like TMZ getting rid of CDK5 and radiotherapy but of course there's many others.
These tumors are rare spread fast and hard to remove with surgery. Therefore doctors are still
working in finding other treatments that are more effective.

References and Citations

Article#1: Mechanotransduction and extracellular matrix homeostasis
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrm3896#
Website title: Nature News

Article#2: Astrocytes: Role and Functions in Brain Pathologies
Link: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2019.01114/full#
Website title: frontiers

Article#3: Deadly brain cancer stopped with new compound
Link: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321809#New-compound-may-halt-tumor-recurrence
Website title: Medical News Today

Article#4: Temozolomide
Link: https://www.thebraintumourcharity.org/brain-tumour-diagnosis-treatment/treating-brain-tumours/adult-treatments/chemotherapy/temozolomide/#:~:text=Temozolomide%20(TMZ)%20is%20a%20chemotherapy,of%20glioblastomas%20and%20anaplastic%20astrocytomas.
Website title: The Brain Tumor Charity