| Abstrakt: |
Pituitary tumors are normally benign, highly differentiated, and slow-growing neoplasms. Despite this, in almost half of the cases, there will be evidence of local invasion into the surrounding structures. Despite their benign growth characteristics and slow clinical progression, pituitary tumors commonly cause serious morbidity. Large pituitary tumors often have mass effects, including headaches and visual failure from optic chiasm compression, and these might cause lifelong disability. Hormone hypersecretion or deficiency can cause severe clinical problems that often require expensive and long-term medical therapy. In some cases, these medications are not well tolerated by the patients. Major advances have been made in the treatment and management of pituitary tumors over the past years, but despite this, their treatment is often unsatisfactory in practice. There is, therefore, a need for developing novel treatments, and we believe gene therapy could provide an alternative approach for the future treatment of human pituitary tumors. With the development of new, safer, and more efficient gene delivery vehicles, gene therapy can be further developed with the aim of treating specific types of pituitary tumors that do not respond well to classic treatment modalities or become resistant to treatment over time. |
