Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Comment
  • Published:

The making of the glioblastoma classification

Subjects

Summary

Classification of cancer should lead to informative patients’ stratification and selective therapeutic vulnerabilities. A pathway-based classification of glioblastoma uncovered a mitochondrial subtype with a unique sensitivity to inhibitors of oxidative phosphorylation. Precision targeting of cancer metabolism could provide therapeutic opportunities to a lethal neoplasm and be translated to other tumour types.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Four-group functional classification of glioblastoma.

References

  1. Cieslik, M. & Chinnaiyan, A. M. Cancer transcriptome profiling at the juncture of clinical translation. Nat. Rev. Genet. 19, 93–109 (2018).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Phillips, H. S., Kharbanda, S., Chen, R., Forrest, W. F., Soriano, R. H., Wu, T. D. et al. Molecular subclasses of high-grade glioma predict prognosis, delineate a pattern of disease progression, and resemble stages in neurogenesis. Cancer Cell 9, 157–173 (2006).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Verhaak, R. G., Hoadley, K. A., Purdom, E., Wang, V., Qi, Y., Wilkerson, M. D. et al. Integrated genomic analysis identifies clinically relevant subtypes of glioblastoma characterized by abnormalities in PDGFRA, IDH1, EGFR, and NF1. Cancer Cell 17, 98–110 (2010).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Wang, Q., Hu, B., Hu, X., Kim, H., Squatrito, M., Scarpace, L. et al. Tumor evolution of glioma-intrinsic gene expression subtypes associates with immunological changes in the microenvironment. Cancer Cell 32, 42–56 (2017). e46.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Garofano, L., Migliozzi, S., Oh, Y. T., D’Angelo, F., Najac, R. D., Ko, A. et al. Pathway-based classification of glioblastoma uncovers a mitochondrial subtype with therapeutic vulnerabilities. Nat. Cancer 2, 141–156 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Venkatesh, H. S., Morishita, W., Geraghty, A. C., Silverbush, D., Gillespie, S. M., Arzt, M. et al. Electrical and synaptic integration of glioma into neural circuits. Nature 573, 539–545 (2019).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  7. Venkataramani, V., Tanev, D. I., Strahle, C., Studier-Fischer, A., Fankhauser, L., Kessler, T. et al. Glutamatergic synaptic input to glioma cells drives brain tumour progression. Nature 573, 532–538 (2019).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

A.I. and A.L. conceived and wrote this Comment article.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Antonio Iavarone.

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable.

Data availability

Not applicable.

Competing interests

A.L. and A.I. are listed as inventors on patent applications filed by Columbia University related to the diagnostic and therapeutic applications of the functional classification described here.

Funding information

This work was supported by NIH R01CA101644, U54CA193313, R01CA131126 and R01CA239721 to A.L.; R01CA178546, U54CA193313, R01CA179044, R01CA190891, R01CA239698, and The Chemotherapy Foundation’s grant to A.I.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Lasorella, A., Iavarone, A. The making of the glioblastoma classification. Br J Cancer 125, 4–6 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-021-01360-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-021-01360-7

Search

Quick links