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This is from our friends at Pinpoint Patient Recruiting. They are doing a survey about GBMs. They want GBM patients or caregivers to participate in an online survey, and are offering you $75 for your time. They will also make a donation to the Musella Foundation!
Please let us know if you do the survey and your experiences with it!
2 interesting treatments. Too early to tell how well they are working, as both are just trying to find the right dosage. They both have some long term survivors. Historically, the survival after recurrence for a GBM is about 7 months. The Polio Virus Vaccine has about 20% of patients alive ranging from 36-73 months. The D2C7-IT trial has about 30% of patients alive, with 2 of them having partial responses and being alive over 8.2 and 34 months.
Disclaimer: The Musella Foundation has funded both treatments.
This is one of the most important articles of the year. It opens the door for improving response to immunotherapies in brain tumors.
This is an exciting experimental treatment for gliomas that have the H3 K27M mutation, which is usually found in DIPG, brainstem glioma, Spinal Cord Gliomas, Midline Gliomas, And gliomas in the Thalamus. The Musella Foundation has been supporting this treatment for years, giving 3 grants to help speed up the development!
This paper shows that it is worth traveling to a major brain tumor center.
SNO is an amazing meeting. Aside from all of the presentations, I got to meet and talk with many brain tumor researchers and physicians and discuss what they think are the best treatments, what is needed to advance the field, what is slowing down progress and much more.
We also were able to interact with many other brain tumor nonprofits. There was some resistance in the past to working together but I think the last barriers were recently removed and you are going to see a lot more collaboration now. We are all about collaboration. Working together we will be able to accomplish much more than any of us could individually.
As the year comes to a close, we reflect back on what was accomplished. This was a really exciting year for brain tumors. We feel that we are on the cusp of a major breakthrough. Everything is coming together - many clinical trials are reporting long term survivors in a small % of patients. Our goal is to speed up the approvals for these treatments so doctors can combine them in cocktails and get long term survivors for most brain tumor patients!
Mebendazole is an old, cheap, easily available drug approved for treating worm infestations. This paper (and many others) suggest it might be useful for treatments brain tumors, especially when combined with radiation. This article is about meningiomas but other articles mention GBM and Medulloblastomas!
In the case presented, the patient had a GBM but was allergic to Temodar so they had to try something different. They tried erltinib and Optune, which has resulted in stable disease for at least 9 months after radiation. It is only 1 case but shows brilliant thinking on the part of this patient's team. They chose Optune, which is the obvious choice, but since the patient overexpressed EGFR, they also added erlotinib. More research needs to be done on such combinations of Optune and therapies personalized to the patient!
This is just in mice at this point but it is an exciting new approach. I wish them luck and will be following this!
Adding Valproic Acid to the standard radiation and Temodar for GBM might help a lot without adding any more long term problems.
I am a little biased on this one as we gave them 3 grants - including our largest ever - to help get them to this point. They will be presenting 10 abstracts at next week's Society for Neuro-Oncology conference in New Orleans. This experimental drug - Onc-201 is the first of it's class - a DRD2/ DRD3 antagonist. Early results were very impressive, and we are hoping they present exciting news next week!
This study shows that biopsy of DIPG is not as dangerous as we thought. Years ago it was never done due to the dangers involved but with advances in pediatric neurosurgery, this study shows that in 53 patients, 2 had problems in surgery that resolved, and only 1 had long term neurological deficit. Of course if you are that one out of 53, it is horrible, but kids with this tumor all develop neuro problems and most die quickly. In the past it was not worth the risk as even if they were able to do a biopsy, it wouldn't matter much as there were no treatments anyway. Now we have access to a lot of targeted treatments that may help.
This is early work but since it is an approved drug for a different disease, it should be easy and fast to test as it can be used off label. I added it as a choice in the virtual trial so if anyone tries it, record it in our virtual trial registry so we can get an idea of if it helps or not. (Virtualtrials.com click on virtual trial)
This is one of my favorite trials and has just opened up in CA, MA and FL in addition to NC. The pediatric version is still only in NC.
Disclaimer: I am on the advisory board of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University, and have given grants towards these projects.
These events are always interesting to watch!
This type of treatment worked miracles in other types of cancer. The first attempt in human glioblastoma wasn't spectacular but these researchers may have found a way to make it work at least in dogs and rats. Lets hope it translates to people!
This one is hard to interpret. The authors say that a low dose is just as effective as the standard dose of Avastin, but with less side effects (and less cost). They should have included the control gorup of patients who do not use Avastin. But it is something to think about.
This shows that Optune has finally hit the mainstream. 55 presentations at the major European brain tumor conference. Many of these are looking at ways to improve the outcomes, including new types of arrays, new placement of arrays for tumors lower in the skill and for pediatric patients.
