Glioblastoma: does PET shed light to a difficult problem?

Glioblastoma is the most common primary brain tumor in the United States and despite aggressive multimodal therapy with maximum safe resection, radiotherapy in combination with concurrent and adjuvant temozolomide, the median survival of glioblastoma in clinical trial populations is 16 months. While the introduction of temozolomide into first-line standard of care (1) achieved some survival improvement, nearly all patients relapse and treatment options for recurrent disease remain limited and largely ineffective. Even under optimal circumstances with use of ‘state of the art’ diagnostic and therapeutic interventions, less than 15% of patients will survive 5 years (2-4).