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This looks interesting and needs further study.
This is only in 1 patient but worth keeping in mind if you have a CNS lymphoma that is not responding to standard treatments. Hopefully they will eventually be able to use this technology for the more common brain tumors!
Orbus Therapeutics launched a new website for their clinical trial of oral Eflornithine (plus lomustine vs. lomustine alone).
Disclaimer: Orbus Therapeutics is a sponsor of the Musella Foundation.
This is for anyone thinking about using Optune. It is a lecture about the treatment, and there is a patient using the treatment that you can talk to. It is for patients and caregivers.
This may lead to a breakthrough in the treatment of most cancers!
This vaccine showed very good results in early trials!
This is the type of effort needed to make headway in the fight against cancer (and birth defects). The Musella Foundation funded early work for this project which led to the big NIH grant which is making it a reality!
This targets Oligo2, which sounds like it might be a great target
This is a very rare, but very serious, side effect of checkpoint inhibitors. Although it is only 1 patient, keep this in mind if you hear of this side effect.
I was asked for my opinion on what I would do if I had a newly diagnosed gbm.. here is my response. We can discuss it in our online forum: https://forum.virtualtrials.org/forum/main-forum
Very interesting study. It says that starting radiation therapy earlier than we usual do actually is worse for the patient. The study was performed just by looking at billing records. I would like to see more research on this. Perhaps look at the reasons radiation was started earlier. Maybe those patients had a lot of residual tumor so they were rushed into radiation as there was less space for recurrence? Or had some other medical reasons.
All new trials should consider adding an Optune arm. Currently, a few interesting trials are not allowing patients to use Optune at the same time as the trial. I feel that is not ethical. Optune has been shown to more than double the 5 year survival rate for adult GBM. If you have to make a choice between trying Optune with a proven benefit and minimal side effects to trying an experimental therapy with no track record and inknown side effects, I would choose Optune. [Disclaimer: Novocure is a sponsor of the Musella Foundation]
This is one of my favorite new treatments. It is too early to tell how well it works, but it looks promising. Disclaimer: I am on the patient advisory board at the Brain Tumor Center at Duke (but have no financial involvement in this treatment)
I have heard excellent things about this camp
This was too small to tell if the treatment works, but it did prove that these cells can cross the blood brain barrier- which is a major step forward. CAR-T cell therapy is one of the most exciting new therapies available. Recently the first CAR-T cell therapy for leukemia was approved by the FDA, after trials showing very high long term remission rates after a single injection!
This is an excellent conference for patients and anyone interested in brain tumors.
Nice Newsweek article about my friend Matthew Zachary who created "Stupid Cancer" - an organization for young adults facing cancer.
Comparative Study of Adjuvant Temozolomide Six Cycles Versus Extended 12 Cycles in Newly Diagnosed Glioblastoma Multiforme. 6 months of Temozolomide for newly diagnosed patients became the standard because the original trials specified 6 months. That was done to speed up the trials. They didn't try various lengths of time and picked the best. This study looks at using 6 vs 12 months or Temozolomide. It is a small study - so you have to be careful, but using the 12 months of temozolomide increased overall survival by over 50% but did triple the chances of having toxicity.
The "standard" dosage of Avastin for brain tumors was not determined by a trial. Other cancers used 10mg/kg. The original small trials for brain tumors used 5mg/kg because of a worry about causing bleeding in the brain - which didn't happen, and it worked well. Then when larger brain tumor trials started up they went with the standard 10mg/kg dose other cancers use. Some brain tumor doctors still use the 5mg/kg lower dose and feel it works as well or better with less side effects. This study goes a step further and says less than 3mg may work as well or better with much less side effects. May be worth considering. They had a big increase in survival but there weren't enough patients to say that is significant statistically
