NEW POTENTIAL TREATMENT FOR BRAIN GLIOMA

According to the latest statistics, brain gliomas are the most common cause of death from CNS tumors. Brain gliomas are also ranked as the second (after stroke) cause of brain surgery The mortality rate from gliomas is high and sometimes reaches 80 %. It is because the tumor grows from undifferentiated cells, which causes its peracute development and malignant transformation. Symptoms of glioma occur at stages 3 and 4, when all treatment is symptomatic, and operations are palliative. In this regard, it is necessary to develop and introduce methods for non-surgical glioma treatment. These methods include the use of antisense oligonucleotides, optogenetics, and oncolytic viruses. The aim of antisense oligonucleotides is to replace a section in a glioma cell genome with a foreign one, which disrupts cell division and leads to apoptosis and necrosis of the entire tumor. Optogenetics excludes the introduction of substances into the body. It provides a certain light signal to glioma cells, which also suppresses the growth of an undifferentiated tumor. Oncolytic viruses are genetically modified viruses that identify tumor cells, penetrate into them and start a cascade of apoptotic reactions Despite all success, such methods are still studied at the laboratory level, their implementation in practical medicine is slow and cautious. However, insufficient knowledge retards the widespread use of potentially promising and effective drugs. Scientists around the world are developing methods to treat brain gliomas at different stages of their development. This article reflects modern achievements of scientists and neurosurgeons, describing new methods for brain glioma treatment. Key words: brain glioma, optogenetics, antisense oligonucleotides, oncolytic viruses, p53 gene. Согласно последним данным статистики, глиомы мозга являются наиболее частой причиной смертей от онкологии центральной нервной системы, а также занимают второе место по частоте как причина хирургических вмешательств на головной мозг, уступая инсультам. Смертность от глиом высока и порой достигает 80 %. Причина этого заключается в том, что опухоль растет из недифференцированных клеток, что обусловливает её молниеносный рост и быстрое озлокачествление. Симптомы глиомы возникают на 3–4 стадии развития, когда все лечение направлено на ликвидацию симптомов, а операции носят паллиативный характер. В связи с этим необходима разработка и внедрение методов по нехирургическому лечению глиом. Такими методами являются использование антисмысловых олигонуклеотидов, оптогенетика, применение онколитических вирусов. Суть использования антисмысловых олигонуклеотидов заключается в замене участка генома клетки глиомы на инородный, попавший извне, что нарушает деление клеток и приводит к апоптозу и некрозу всей опухоли. Оптогенетика исключает введение веществ в организм и заключается в подаче определенного светового сигнала на глиозные клетки, что также тормозит рост недифференцированной опухоли. Онколитические вирусы – это генномодифицированные вирусы, которые определяют опухолевые клетки, проникают в них и запускают каскад апоптотических реакций. Несмотря на все успехи, данные методы продолжают изучаться на уровне лабораторий, их внедрение в практическую медицину происходит медленно и со страхом. Однако недостаточная изученность тормозит широкое применение потенциально перспективных и эффективных лекарств. Учеными мира разрабатываются методы, позволяющие лечить глиомы мозга на разных стадиях их развития. Данная статья отображает современные достижения ученых и нейрохирургов в поисках возможности применения такого рода методов. Ключевые слова: глиома мозга, оптогенетика, антисмысловые олигонуклеотиды, онколитические вирусы, ген р53.

“I’m gonna lose my strength, I’m gonna seize and die, And all that Jazz”! Neurological diseases in jazz legends

ABSTRACT Even though jazz is a musical style that excels in improvisation and virtuosity, it is not without its share of anecdotes, drama, and downright tragedy, and the biographies of jazz musicians and their demise are fraught with ominous and dire straits. Unsurprisingly, some would develop chronic and fatal diseases. The neurological diseases that afflicted the following six composers and musicians, all of whom are considered jazz legends, are briefly discussed: Charles Mingus, diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; Lester Young and Charlie Parker, both diagnosed with neurosyphilis; Thelonius Monk, who had possible frontotemporal dementia; George Gershwin, who died as a result of brain glioma; and Cole Porter, who developed phantom limb pain following an amputation. The association of lifestyles, with drug abuse, particularly alcohol and heroin, in addition to great sexual promiscuity factors contributed to the development of a series of diseases such as syphilis. In addition, we also described some fatalities such as neurodegenerative diseases and cerebral glioma.

Research and Analysis of Brain Glioma Imaging Based on Deep Learning

The incidence of glioma is increasing year by year, seriously endangering people’s health. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can effectively provide intracranial images of brain tumors and provide strong support for the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Accurate segmentation of brain glioma has positive significance in medicine. However, due to the strong variability of the size, shape, and location of glioma and the large differences between different cases, the recognition and segmentation of glioma images are very difficult. Traditional methods are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and inefficient, and single-modal MRI images cannot provide comprehensive information about gliomas. Therefore, it is necessary to synthesize multimodal MRI images to identify and segment glioma MRI images. This work is based on multimodal MRI images and based on deep learning technology to achieve automatic and efficient segmentation of gliomas. The main tasks are as follows. A deep learning model based on dense blocks of holes, 3D U-Net, is proposed. It can automatically segment multimodal MRI glioma images. U-Net network is often used in image segmentation and has good performance. However, due to the strong specificity of glioma, the U-Net model cannot effectively obtain more details. Therefore, the 3D U-Net model proposed in this paper can integrate hollow convolution and densely connected blocks. In addition, this paper also combines classification loss and cross-entropy loss as the loss function of the network to improve the problem of category imbalance in glioma image segmentation tasks. The algorithm proposed in this paper has been used to perform a lot of experiments on the BraTS2018 dataset, and the results prove that this model has good segmentation performance.

The Roles of Exosomes as Future Therapeutic Agents and Diagnostic Tools for Glioma

Glioma is a common type of tumor originating in the brain. Glioma develops in the gluey supporting cells (glial cells) that surround and support nerve cells. Exosomes are extracellular vesicles that contain microRNAs, messenger RNA, and proteins. Exosomes are the most prominent mediators of intercellular communication, regulating, instructing, and re-educating their surrounding milieu targeting different organs. As exosomes’ diameter is in the nano range, the ability to cross the blood–brain barrier, a crucial obstacle in developing therapeutics against brain diseases, including glioma, makes the exosomes a potential candidate for delivering therapeutic agents for targeting malignant glioma. This review communicates the current knowledge of exosomes’ significant roles that make them crucial future therapeutic agents and diagnostic tools for glioma.