Combination therapy for glioblastoma shows promising results in early-stage research This project is funded, in part, by the Musella Foundation!
It shows that that the vaccine can be enhanced significantly by using other immune modulating drugs. The full text of the article is not available for free, only the abstract is free. The full text shows how strong the effect is when using each treatment separately, then in all combinations. It is a major improvement.
This project also shows, I think for the first time, that the immune suppression caused by PD-L1 is created by tumor-infiltrating myeloid cells and not directly by the tumor cells, which is what I always assumed. The huge significance of this is that doing a biopsy of a tumor and testing for PD-L1 on the tumor cells shouldn't make any difference to how the treatment would work.
I would love to see this being done in humans.
Antiangiogenic treatments prolong OS in glioblastoma subgroup This is exciting. They found that Avastin can more than double the survival for patients who have highly vascularized tumors. The test they use - perfusion MRI is readily available. This shows how antiquated our clinical trial system is. It is going to be very hard to find a single treatment that cures everyone. Until we find that, we have to use what we have. That is many treatments that each help a small group tremendously, helps a little in a larger group, and not at all in others. Avastin failed when they did a trial mixing all patients. The best way to have run the trial is to test early to see how the treatment is doing, and figure out which subgroups benefit and which do not. At that point, they should stop accruing patients that they know will not do well - let them try other trials. But we are not doing that now. (There is some work going on to try this - called adaptive trial design - but it is not widespread). Obviously, the best way is to get as many of these treatments approved so we can use them in rational combinations. Figure out which treatments will help YOUR particular tumor, and combine the few that look best.
