Glioblastoma is one of the most common, deadly and difficult to treat brain tumors in adults, only 25% of patients survive more than one year. The average survival time is 12 to 18 months
Glioblastoma is the most aggressive brain cancer. Each year it causes more than 200,000 deaths worldwide and the average life expectancy of patients is less than two years. This cancer gives few life options to patients who suffer from it, says Nabil Hajj i, from Imperial College London (United Kingdom), whose team seems to have found a new approach not only to increase their life expectancy, but also to cure to the patients.
The strategy seems simple: starve the tumor cells .
The researchers have used a drug -ADI-PEG20- capable of degrading arginine in the blood of the systemic circulation. Arginine, he explains, “is a semi-essential amino acid normally found in the diet, but required by a variety of cancer cells, especially those that grow rapidly; therefore, depriving tumors of this amino acid has been explored as a potential anticancer strategy in a variety of tumor types , including glioblastoma.”
