More than 25,000 Americans are diagnosed with brain cancer every year, a disease with poor prognosis. An article in the March/April issue of Scientific American Mind presents a new view of the causes of brain cancer that could eventually lead to treatments that could help patients survive. Among the treatments suggested are drugs already used to treat common psychiatric disorders.

Progress in developing new treatments for brain cancers has been agonizingly slow; the US Food and Drug Administration has only approved three new drugs for brain cancer treatment in the past 35 years and these prolong lives by only a few months. However, the recent discovery of tumour regenerating stem cells has changed our understanding of how tumours develop in the brain and has led to an increase in potential targets for therapy, writes Gregory Foltz.

Research published last year suggested that some drugs used to treat mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia might kill cancer stem cells in the brain - although testing of these drugs for use in brain cancer is still in its very early stages. However, once the most promising existing drugs have been identified progress may be rapid. Foltz writes that "clinical trials should start reasonably quickly due to the fact that many of the drugs have already been tested for safety and approved".