CLEVELAND — Research doctors from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Case School of Engineering and Cleveland Clinic have discovered new ways to better treat patients diagnosed with brain cancer.
Using Artificial Intelligence paired with MRI scans and genomics, researchers have developed a new, more accurate was to determine both the relative life expectancy of glioblastoma patients and patients who could be candidates for experimental clinical drug trials.
Glioblastoma is an aggressive, fast-moving brain tumor. While it accounts for just 15 percent of all people diagnosed with brain cancer, those diagnosed with glioblastoma rarely survive more than a few years.
“While we’re just at the beginning, this is a big step, and someday it could mean that if you have glioblastoma, you could know whether you’ll respond to chemotherapy well or to immunotherapy, based on a patient’s image and gene profiles,” said Manmeet Ahluwalia, MD, Miller Family Endowed Chair of NeuroOncology at the Burkhardt Brain Tumor and Neuro-Oncology Center at Cleveland Clinic, and a co-author of the study.
The research, which was lead by Pallavi Tiwari, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at CWRU and Niha Beig, a Ph.D student in Tiwari's lab, was published in the February edition of Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
