Trump Chooses Dr. Scott Gottlieb To Head Food And Drug Administration Sounds like a great pick! I have been working on a plan to speed up drug approvals for brain tumors - and slash the price of new drugs. Maybe Dr Gottlieb would be open to the idea of helping brain tumor patients. Does anyone happen to have a connection to him? Let me know!
Clinical Trial Announcement
Convection-Enhanced Delivery (CED) of MDNA55 in Adults With Glioblastoma at First Recurrence or Progression Disclosure: the company that makes this is a sponsor of the Musella Foundation
This is an exciting trial. It is similar (although it uses a different target) to a trial done a long time ago that failed because the state of the art in convection enhanced delivery at that time did not allow the drug to get to the entire tumor. Now the technology has improved to the point where it can deliver the drug to just about anywhere we want it to go! A major advantage of this type of treatment over other immunotherapies is that it does not rely on your immune system to help it. The fusion protein binds to the IL-4 receptor (which about 80% of glioblastomas over-express, and normal cells do not express), and carried the toxin to those cells - which makes this a smart bomb type of approach - it should theoretically kill tumor cells and not normal cells.
Role of MGMT Methylation Status at Time of Diagnosis and Recurrence for Patients with Glioblastoma: Clinical Implications. Good project, but I disagree with their conclusion. They found that 25% of the time, the methylation status changes between the first and second surgery. They conclude that it is insignificant and we shouldn't bother testing the second time as it provides no useful information. They are correct for now, but that should change very shortly as there is now a drug in clinical trials that can work on unmethylated patients. This makes the methylation status very important to determine, and for those 25% of patients with the changed status, it can be a life altering test.
Absence of cytomegalovirus in glioblastoma and other high-grade gliomas by real-time PCR, immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization This is a hot topic. Some researchers are reporting 100% of GBMs have cytomegalovirus. Other researchers are reporting none have it. I would love to see a roundtable discussion with both groups getting together, discuss the methods they use, and finally figure it out. It has profound consequences. Some early results of targeting CMV in small trials has showed some success, so I lean toward the group that says there is CMV in GBMs. More research is needed.
