Abstract

During the last five decades, enormous advances in treatment modalities for cancer and a better understanding of cancer cell biology have been accomplished but the prognosis of patients carrying malignant gliomas still remains poor despite hundreds of clinical trials have been carried out. In this article we review phase II clinical trials that have been completed and published in PubMed during 2011 in order to investigate potential reasons of clinical failure. We suggest that a translational gap, defined as a failure to translate basic research into clinical trials design may explain the poor outcome of phase II clinical trials.

Keywords: Clinical trial, Glioma, phenotype, stem cells, stem cell theory, stemness.

Graphical Abstract