Effective treatment for brain tumours

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Doctors can more effectively treat many brain tumours by first ascertaining their genetic characteristics, rather than studying tissue samples under a microscope, the standard practice, two teams of researchers recetly discovered.

The findings could alter diagnosis and treatment decisions for thousands of patients, experts said, and mark an important advance in so-called precision medicine, in which cancer treatments are customised according to the genetic makeup of the patient’s tumorus.

The reports, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, focused on gliomas, which account for roughly a third of brain cancer cases. In the new studies - one coordinated by the National Institutes of Health, the other led by the Mayo Clinic and the University of California, San Francisco - research teams performed multiple genetic analyses on 1,380 tumours. Both teams found that the tumours could be grouped into a few categories, which could be determined by looking at a handful of genetic glitches.

Tumours with one genetic profile, for instance, were relatively slow growers and responsive to drug treatment, making them good candidates for chemotherapy alone. Tumours in another category grew relatively slowly but were not as responsive to drugs, suggesting that combined therapy was best.

And those in a third category were nascent aggressors, for which the prognosis is usually dim.  Researchers say that catching the tumours early will give them time to enrol in experimental trials and get more specific guidance on which treatments and trials may be most suitable.