Glioblastoma Evaluation for Heterogeneity In RadioseNsitivity (GEHIRN): Preclinical Observational Study on Ex-vivo Surgical Specimens

Standard of care for newly diagnosed glioblastoma (GBM) patients consists of surgical resection followed by radiotherapy with concurrent and adjuvant Temozolomide chemotherapy. Despite these treatments, the prognosis remains poor. Nevertheless, preliminary data on GBM patients show variable outcomes related to a different treatment response, that could be related to the GBM intrinsic heterogeneity, but also to a different patient sensitivity to radiation therapy.

The assessment of this individual radio-sensitivity may provide valuable data to define more tailored treatment schedules, that could potentially be more effective.

Published studies on small cohort of patients show that a possible system to investigate the tumor radiation sensitivity, is to monitor the cellular DNA damage after tissue irradiation, that correlates with the survival fraction of in vitro tumor cells; the DNA damage could be identified through the quantification of Phosphorylated histone H2AX nuclear foci that correlate with the unrepaired DNA double strand breaks (DSBs).

Based on this background, The investigators designed an observational study on GBM surgical samples to investigate if increasing doses of radiation therapy could improve the radiation response; and in particular they will assess if there is a correlation between the number of the phosphorylated H2AX nuclear foci and the different dose level of radiation therapy.