Why glioblastoma is difficult to treat

a recent study in Israel and the United States found that glioblastoma cells are divided into four subtypes, and each subtype converts to each other, which explains one reason why glioblastoma cells are difficult to kill by drugs.
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Salk Institute for Biological Research in the United States found that glioblastomas differ from patient to patient and even from cells in the same tumor. There is currently no effective treatment, as each drug can kill only some tumor cells, and future effective treatments must be able to attack all four subtypes of glioblastoma cells.
researchers took tumor samples from 28 patients with glioblastoma and used "single-cell RND (RND) sequencing" to create gene expression scores for about 24,000 tumor cells. After analysis, the researchers identified the characteristics and conditions of four different subtypes of glioblastoma cells, each with its own unique gene activation procedure.
researchers injected glioblastoma cells from the human body into laboratory mice and tracked them to show that the characteristics of these tumor cells had changed and that they switched between different subsypes. This explains why glioblastoma cells are difficult to kill by drugs, making the disease difficult to treat.
researchers hope to explore targeted treatments that attack all subsysmot tumor cells by studying the specific response of each subsylular tumor cell to the drug, thereby treating glioblastoma. This method of study can also be used to understand the cell subsypes of other cancers.
glioblastoma is a common malignant brain tumor. The common treatment is to remove the tumor as much as possible, and then use radiotherapy and chemotherapy to extend life. However, because tumor cells still exist in the brain, the average life expectancy after diagnosis can only be calculated in months.
results were published in the American journal Cell. (Source: Xinhua News Agency, Chen Wenxian,
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