Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have identified a drug sequencing strategy that made the most common and deadly primary brain tumor in adults dramatically more sensitive to chemotherapy in laboratory and mouse models, providing a potential explanation for why prior clinical trials combining the same drugs failed and pointing toward a different approach that has not yet been tested in patients.
The findings, published July 8, 2026, in Science Translational Medicine, show that pretreating glioblastoma with a class of drugs called EGFR inhibitors, before rather than alongside the chemotherapy drug temozolomide (TMZ), dramatically reduced tumor cells' ability to resist the chemotherapy.
