The inverse paradigm and the ancestral cell of IDH-wildtype glioblastoma

ABSTRACT

Rethinking IDH-wildtype glioblastoma through its unique features can help researchers find innovative and effective treatments. It is currently emerging that, after decades of therapeutic impasse, some traditional concepts regarding IDH-wildtype glioblastoma need to be supplemented and updated to overcome therapeutic resistance. Indeed, multiple clinical aspects and recent indirect and direct experimental data are providing evidence that the supratentorial brain parenchyma becomes entirely and quiescently micro-infiltrated long before primary tumor bulk growth. Furthermore, they are indicating that the known micro-infiltration that occurs during the IDH-wildtype glioblastoma growth and evolution is not at the origin of distant relapses. It follows that the ubiquitous supratentorial brain parenchyma micro-infiltration as a source for the development of widespread distant recurrences is actually due to the silent stage that precedes tumor growth rather than to the latter. All this implies that, in addition to the heterogeneity of the primary bulk, there is a second crucial cause of therapeutic resistance that has never hitherto been identified and challenged. In this regard, the ancestral founder cancer stem cell (CSC) appears as the key cell that can link the two causes of resistance.