Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and malignant type of primary brain tumor. Tumor heterogeneity is a major factor in glioblastoma's poor response to therapy and seemingly inevitable recurrence. The current standard of care for treating newly diagnosed GBMs is maximal safe resection followed by radiation with concurrent and adjuvant temozolomide (Stupp et al., 2005), a regimen which has been shown to improve the median overall survival (12.1 months versus 14.6 months) (Stupp et al., 2005) and the 2-year (27.2% vs. 10.9%) and 5-year (10.9% vs. 1.9%) survival rates compared to radiation alone (Johnson and O'Neill, 2012). There are only four chemotherapeutic agents approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating GBM (lomustine, carmustine, temozolomide, and bevacizumab). Otherwise, multiple randomized phase III clinical trials testing various agents have unfortunately failed to show an improvement in the overall survival of patients with newly diagnosed or recurrent GBM (Seystahl et al., 2016).

This special issue aims to provide a platform for all pharmaceutical and translational scientists and welcomes the submission of original research articles, review articles, and clinical studies focusing on the evaluation of new molecular pathways as pharmacological targets for treatment strategies which may improve the management of aggressive and resistant GBMs.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Mechanisms of resistance to current pharmacological approaches and strategies to overcome the reduced sensitivity
• Discovery and validation of novel molecular targeted agents
• Glioma stem-like cells as target for new therapeutic approaches
• Radio-sensitizing agents
• Metabolic reprogramming in rapidly growing tumors
• Immunomodulators and novel immune therapies