Treatment of Gliomas: How did we get here?

Over the past 30 years, the treatment of gliomas has become more multi-modality with clinical trials demonstrating that adjuvant chemo-radiation following surgery improves survival of patients. Unfortunately, this advance in therapeutic intervention has had a modest impact on patient survival, with only a 3–6 month improvement in survival during this time period. In this review, we discuss the progress made in each key aspect of glioma treatment; chemotherapy, surgery and radiation therapy. We present key clinical trials that were used as basis for current management guidelines for patients with gliomas. Ultimately, it is clear that future treatments of patients with gliomas will entail specific chronologic combinations of these three modalities in personalized regimens designed for individual patient tumor sub-type.