A case report of successful combined intra-arterial immunotherapy and cytokine genetic therapy treatment in a patient with recurrent glioblastoma.

Background: Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common primary malignant brain tumor with very poor prognosis due to frequent recurrence and short overall survival (OS) time, which according to different sources, is not longer than 17 months after the diagnosis. Infiltrative growth pattern often leads to tumor propagation into functionally significant brain areas while surgery is cytoreductive and does not necessarily alter the prognosis. Many patients are in the working age, thus finding conservative approaches to the treatment of this type of neoplasms is of utmost importance.

Flow cytometric analysis of the ERCC1, marker of DNA damage repair, in the tumor specimens embedded into paraffin blocks.

The differences in expression of ERCC1 were estimated between tumor specimens embedded into paraffin blocks and surgical biopsy specimens of non-small cell lung cancer as well as breast and ovarian cancers. Concordance or differences not higher than 20% were observed in 73% of the cases. The number of the cases with more significant differences in ERCC1 expression was less than 17%.