Investigating potential drug targets for the treatment of glioblastoma: a Mendelian randomization study.

Glioblastoma (GBM), one of the most aggressive brain tumors, has a 5-year survival rate of less than 5%. Current standard therapies, including surgery, radiotherapy, and temozolomide (TMZ) chemotherapy, are limited by drug resistance and the blood-brain barrier. Integrating expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) and protein quantitative trait loci (pQTL) data has shown promise in uncovering disease mechanisms and therapeutic targets. This study combined eQTL and pQTL analyses to identify potential GBM-related genes and circulating plasma proteins for therapeutic exploration. Using transcriptomic data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), we identified 2,528 differentially expressed genes, including GPX7 and CXCL10. eQTL-MR analysis identifies GBM-associated differentially expressed genes and constructs a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network.Integrating pQTL data from the deCODE database, pQTL-MR, and colocalization analyses validated the therapeutic potential of GPX7 and CXCL10.These findings provide new perspectives on GBM biology and suggest actionable targets for therapy. Despite limitations due to sample size and population-specific data, this study highlights GPX7 and CXCL10 as promising candidates for further investigation and lays the foundation for targeted GBM treatments.