What would you consider to be the major opportunities and challenges in improving the prospects for patients with brain tumours?

In present,  treatment like surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy are used for treatment of Brain tumor in patient, however, still more effective treatment is needed to treat brain tumors. In order to improve the prospect for patients with brain tumors there are some key challenges for future research department.

Challenge:  as one of the main treatment used by doctors to treat brain tumors are radiotherapy a approach that uses a molecular vehicle to selectively transport a radionuclide to malignant cell populations, however, one of the challenge directly related to the radiotherapy is that due their macromolecular size as consequences it diffuse slowly through tissue, hindering the delivery to tumor cells distant from their injection site. Surgery is another treatment used to treat low grade tumor and if visible tumor remain after surgery then chemotherapy can be used, however, surgery can be challenging as blood brain barrier of body generally protect the spinal cord and brain from unsafe chemicals (Aldape et al., 2019), though, this barrier also keeps out many type of chemotherapy and performing surgery became difficult if tumor is located in delicate part, and visible part of tumors may remain as they are too small to remove and radiotherapy can also damage tissue that are healthy, these hindrance are biggest challenge in treatment of brain tumors.  The failure of many drugs to treat the brain tumor at meaningful extent is also a challenge for researcher. Drug complex cancer, the genomes, epigenomes of the brain tumor has enabled separation into molecular and clinical subgroups, regardless of few exceptions it is yet to be identified therapeutic activity in patients, to deliver effective treatment the much deeper understanding will require of biology of the drug target.

Opportunity: Researchers have been reviewing the possible lasers to burn away solid tumors, however, the idea is said to be ahead of the technology and still take some time to be fully developed, though there is two problems related with it too such as researcher don’t know how to monitor amount of tissue destroyed by the laser, secondly the bare fibre optic cables might get so heat up that they might wound the surrounding tissue causing further damage and risk in destroying the tumor, but if the researcher successfully found the way to mitigate these risk it will be supportive in treating patient with brain tumor (Goriely et al.,2015). The combination therapy can also help in future to treat the brain tumor effectively, the equipment have been around for decades, but it’s progressing slowly.

 Angiogenesis inhibitors can help in fighting brain tumor, it is still in development stage and might take five more year and as of now in clinical trails, if this became successful it will become standard therapy especially in treatment of glioblastomas tumor (Goradel et al., 2019).

Reference:

Aldape, K., Brindle, K. M., Chesler, L., Chopra, R., Gajjar, A., Gilbert, M. R., & Jones, D. T. (2019). Challenges to curing primary brain tumors. Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, 16(8), 509-520.

Goradel, N. H., Asghari, M. H., Moloudizargari, M., Negahdari, B., Haghi-Aminjan, H., & Abdollahi, M. (2017). Melatonin as an angiogenesis inhibitor to combat cancer: Mechanistic evidence. Toxicology and applied pharmacology, 335, 56-63.

Goriely, A., Geers, M. G., Holzapfel, G. A., Jayamohan, J., Jérusalem, A., Sivaloganathan, S., & Kuhl, E. (2015). Mechanics of the brain: perspectives, challenges, and opportunities. Biomechanics and modeling in mechanobiology, 14(5), 931-965.