Clinical trials are designed to determine whether a new approach is both safe and effective.

Treatments that may be studied include:

• Radiation twice daily
• Hyperthermia, in which a tumor is heated to increase the effect of radiation
• Drugs injected into the artery leading to the brain or directly into the brain
• High-dose chemotherapy followed by bone marrow transplant
• Biological therapy, which is a treatment to improve the body's immune system to fight the cancer
• Molecular chemotherapy, or anticancer drugs based on newly discovered signaling pathways in brain tumor cells
• Gene therapy and viral therapy, or the use of viruses or vectors (carriers) to deliver cancer-killing genes or agents to disease sites