Dopamine signaling: target in glioblastoma

Despite numerous promising discoveries in contemporary cancer research, and the emerging innovative cancer treatment strategies, the global burden of malignant diseases is expected to rise, in part due to the rapidly aging human populations. Consequently, there is an urgent need to design and validate new treatments in oncology, especially for cancer types with presently dismal prognosis due to limited treatment options, such as for patients suffering from glioblastoma multiforme. The efforts to address such need rely in large part on the recently introduced powerful technologies including high-throughput screens to uncover genetic and functional vulnerabilities of specific types of human tumors. Such effort also raises hopes to identify molecular targets so far associated with pathologies other than malignancies, and thereby bring about opportunities to repurpose already existing, approved drugs that target such mechanisms. Apart from lower cost of introducing such treatments for oncological diseases, drug repurposing is also good news due to much shorter time needed from target discovery to clinical applications, an aspect particularly valuable in disease contexts such as glioblastoma.