Tocagen Presents Updated Interim Survival Data from Ongoing Clinical Studies Excellent news. This treatment is very elegant. They inject a virus into the tumor - in 1 of 3 different ways - this virus can only infect cancer cells (see tocagen.com for how that works). When it infects them, it inserts a gene that encodes for an enzyme which converts a nontoxic oral fungus medication into a powerful chemotherapy - only in the cancer cells theoretically leaving normal cells alone.
They let the virus spread for a month or so, then give the oral medication. This kills the cancer cells that have enough copies of the gene. The cells that were infected but did not get enough copies of the gene acts as a reservoir to start the cycle again. They wait another month and repeat the oral medications.
If that sounds scary, they did build in a safeguard. They designed the virus to be very sensitive to oral anti-viral drugs so that if something bad did happen (and it hasn't yet), they can give a drug and clear the virus from your system in about a day. Also the virus can't live in normal healthy cells.
The Musella Foundation has funded a small part of these studies.
Agenus (AGEN) Provides Update on its Brain Cancer Vaccine By itself the increase in survival doesn't sound like a lot but this adds a new possible tool to the toolkit that can be used to put together a cocktail that might have a long lasting effect. Best part is it is well tolerated with no serious side effects.
The Impact of Surgery on the Efficacy
of Adjuvant Therapy in Glioblastoma Multiforme This shows a major difference in outcome between GBM patients who had "radical" surgery vs. thos who did not. They used a criteria of 1.5cm in diameter of residual tumor as the cutoff from radical to non radical surgery. They did not go into detail on outcomes from patients with total resections but it looks like extent of surgery - even on a rough look like this - makes more of a difference than anything else. This goes to show that selecting the right neurosurgeon and medical center - with the most experiance and the best tools, is the most important decision you can make.
5-ALA Fluorescence Image Guided Resection of Glioblastoma Multiforme: A Meta-Analysis of the Literature 5-ALA is a dye that is used during surgery to allow the surgeon to better see where the tumor is. It is approved and used routinely in Europe for many years but not approved in the USA. This article looks at all of the literature and shows that using the dye resulted in a much higher % of patients getting a total resection, and reported over 6 months increase in survival by using this dye. That is one of the largest increases in survival of any treatment for GBMs, and it is a safe, oral dye with no known side effects (other than sensitivity to the sun for a few days). It is criminal that it is not in use here in the USA.
