Emerging patents in the therapeutic areas of glioma and glioblastoma

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most common and aggressive malignant glioma, with patients having a median survival of just over one year. Current chemotherapies, with surgery and radiotherapy, provide only minor patient benefit. There is a great need to discover and develop novel therapies for this devastating disease.

Areas covered: The patent literature reveals novel therapies, providing insights into emerging GBM therapeutics. We have used the Google and USPTO patent databases to generate a detailed landscape of patents and patent applications from companies active in the areas of glioma and/or GBM. Specific patents have been grouped into six areas: novel compounds; treatments and therapeutic targets; combination therapies; immunotherapies; delivery methods; and biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis.

Expert opinion: There has been a steady increase in the number of patents on GBM over the last five years. Despite many new compounds being developed and patented for a broad range of cancers, only a small percentage of these are specifically targeted to GBM. Notable trends in the patent literature include both the development of combination therapies to combat the heterogeneous nature of GBM, and the use of immunotherapies building on the promise of cancer vaccines and CAR T-cell therapy.

KEYWORDS:

• Glioma
• glioblastoma
• combination therapy
• immunotherapy
• diagnosis and prognosis
• drug delivery
• chemotherapy

Article highlights

• Many novel anti-cancer compounds are being patented, but very few of these specifically target GBM.

• Immunotherapy is emerging as an exciting and promising treatment strategy for GBM.

• The glioma/GBM patenting landscape is trending toward combination- and immuno-therapies.

• Improved drug delivery and tumor penetration are essential for enhanced therapeutic efficacy.

• Multi-target therapies are most likely to provide efficacy due to the heterogeneous nature of GBM.

• Identification of novel targets that are ubiquitously expressed across all GBM cell lineages may enable the development of effective, long lived therapies.

This box summarizes key points contained in the article.

Declaration of interest

M Harris is in receipt of a BBSRC Doctoral training partnership grant. S Svensson, L Kopanitsa and D Bailey are employees of IOTA Pharmaceuticals. The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewer disclosure

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Supplementary material

Supplementary material for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council [grant number BB/JO14540/1] and The Brain Tumour Charity (UK) [grant number GN-000429]. The authors declare no competing commercial interests.