Latest News

• Learn More About GammaTile® Therapy, Surgically Targeted Radiation Therapy For Brain Tumors, At Patient Education Event On Thursday, February 4         GammaTile  is an FDA approved treatment for brain tumors that is implanted at the time of surgery (both newly diagnosed or recurrent) and can double the time before the tumor grows, which buys time for other treatments to work. It is not available everywhere just yet, visit their website to see which centers are using it now and ask your neurosurgeon about it. This free webinar will go into detail about it.
  



• First Glioblastoma Patient Dosed in Phase 2 Trial Testing PVSRIPO Plus Keytruda         This combination makes sense and it is worth looking at this trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04479241   It is for patients with recurrent Glioblastoma.
  



• Mebendazole and temozolomide in patients with newly diagnosed high-grade gliomas: results of a phase 1 clinical trial         It is difficult to interpret the results because there was a mix of anaplastic astrocytoma and glioblastoma, and they did not disclose the MGMT methylation status, the IDH status ir if they patients used Optune or any other treatment. However, they have shown that adding Mebendazole is safe, and it appears that the outcome is a little better than Temozolomide alone.  This is a pretty popular drug for Glioblastoma patients to take. It is part of the Care Oncology Protocol, which also adds 3 other repurposed approved drugs. The Care Oncology protocol has some imnpressive data behind it.
  



• Very Low Mutation Burden Is a Feature of Inflamed Recurrent Glioblastomas Responsive to Cancer Immunotherapy        This reports the opposite of what we thought regarding tumor mutational burden.  A high tumor mutational burden in other cancers would make the tumor more likely to respond to immunotherapy but that did not work out with Glioblastomas.  This study says that a very low tumor mutational burden for glioblastomas results in a better response with immunotherapies. They also release some new data from the PVSRIPO trial showing impressive results for recurrent Glioblastoma patients with less than the median tumor mutational burden.  Of 21 patients in the trial, 10 in the high TMB group and 11 in the Low TMB group, at the 3 years point after treatment 3 of the patients in the low TMB group were alive, while none in the High TMB group were alive.  These 3 patients were still alive at the end of the trial, one at 36 months, one at 60 months and one at 96 months!  It is a small number of patients, but I would consider this trial if I had a low TMB.  TMB is usually reported on your pathology report.