At the Association for Molecular Pathology's annual meeting in San Jose last week, the University of Pittsburgh's Marina Nikiforovna offered clinicians a novel way to distinguish between classifications of glioblastomas. Mutations of the IDH1 and IDH2 genes were discovered in 2008, and a high frequency of brain tumors — between 60 and 94 percent — show those mutations, Nikiforovna said. In fact, researchers speculate that a mutation in the IDH pathway is an early event of glial genesis.