Musella Foundation awards research grant for promising new brain tumor therapy This is an exciting new treatment. It is a next generation combination targeting 2 pathways:
1. an antiangiogenic drug - which blocks the formation of new blood vessels, which starves the tumor
2. Anti-invasion - so the tumor cells can't spread out looking for a new blood supply.
Triacetin-based acetate supplementation as a chemotherapeutic adjuvant therapy in glioma. This article shows that - in the lab - a common food additive that has been deemed "safe" by the FDA may have anti tumor properties and in the test tube may help Temodar work better. Of course, this isn't in humans so we do not know yet if it would help people, but I love the idea of using a readily available, cheap, nontoxic to increase the chances that Temodar would help..
Phase II study of cilengitide in the treatment of refractory or relapsed high-grade gliomas in children: A report from the Children's Oncology Group. Unfortunately, this trial didn't turn out well. They used cilengitide by itself and most children progressed quickly. This is an interesting drug. I think it will turn out that it is very useful - but in combination with other treatments as part of a comprehensive cocktail approach. I hope these negative results do not stop further research into combinations.
This also points out an important point when looking at results. They had a 3 year survivor who is still doing well. If that person happened to be in an online support group - the people in that group might tend to think - wow - this is a miracle drug - since they didn't see the other people in the trial doing poorly, they assume the trial worked. But what happens is that in some cases - particularly children, some people do well no matter what treatment you do to them. You need to compare the results of the experimental group to what would be expected with standard treatments and show an improvement. You can not judge by 1 or a few individual cases.
Controlling tumor invasion: bevacizumab and BMP4 for glioblastoma.
The Musella Foundation funded this experiment! The concept is excellent - the thinking was if Avastin cuts off the blood supply to the tumor, the tumor cells will try to find a new blood supply by migrating towards areas of higher oxygen content. This makes the tumor resistant to Avastin. If you combine Avastin with a drug that stops the invasion, you may prevent the resistance and kill the entire tumor. We funded a prior research project that showed BMP4 has an anti invasion effect so it seemed like a good candidate for this experiment.
Unfortunately, it didn't work out as expected. The Avastin did not increase the invasiveness of the tumor! Since there was no increased invasiveness, the BMP4 didn't have much effect. Since other experiments we funded have shown that Avastin does increase invasiveness in a different mouse model, I think this experiment should be repeated in a few other models and perhaps try a few different anti-invasive drugs.
