The Future of Glioma Care

  • The approval of vorasidenib to treat patients with IDH-mutant, grade 2 gliomas marks the first major drug approval for glioma in many years.
  • Experts in the field are hopeful that this will encourage pharmaceutical companies to invest more in studying the best ways to treat the disease.
  • Progress is already underway to determine the best ways to use vorasidenib, when to re-test tissue, what to do when patients progress on the drug, and more.

The approval of vorasidenib to treat patients with IDH-mutant, grade 2 gliomas is a big deal — and experts are hoping this ground-breaking discovery will lead to even more progress and hope in the field.

“I hope [vorasidenib] is a catalyst for pharma to take glioma seriously,” Dr. Ganesh Rao, Chair of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, tells SurvivorNet Connect. “This is the first drug in 20+ years that we’ve had … drug development in other cancers far outpaces glioma. It’s not even close. Here, you’ve got a market. You’ve got people interested. You’ve got unbelievable intellectual horsepower behind this … so I hope that next year or the year after that, there are a bunch of targeted therapies.”

The other experts featured in SurvivorNet’s Connect panel at SNO shared similar excitement.

Using the Covid-19 pandemic as an example, Dr. Erin Dunbar, a neuro-oncologist at Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta, explains, “As physicians, suddenly we were all thrust into telehealth. So what do we do? We wrote papers and learned how can we give adequate care over telehealth and then how can we work with government and payers and legislation to make sure that telehealth didn’t go away for our patients.”

During this time, many different institutions began working together in novel ways.

“So now we add in additional scientific discovery and know more about IDH targeted therapies. And now as we’re talking about vorasidenib … we’re building clinical trials for those that progress on vorasidenib. We are learning how to combine and sequence and we’re making sure that we retest the tissue when appropriate so we can understand if someone has progressed on vorasidenib.”

While there’s much work to be done, for the first time in decades, the future of glioma care looks quite hopeful.