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This technology will help make braintumor surgery safer, and may also make some tumors that were thought inoperable, operable!
Disclosure: I am on the patient advisory board of this medical center!
Interesting use of an already approved drug for brain tumors with IDH mutations. It hasn't been tried in clinical trials yet.
I love collaborations like this. It will help speed up the search for the cure. An interesting part of this is that Independent Blue Cross will pay for the genomic testing of the patients for their patients. Cost was a big stumbling block for some similar projects.
The Musella Foundation helped fund some of the early work on this!
This project involves a new material that can be 3-d printed into the shape of a bone flap, which can be inserted when the original bone flap created during a brain tumor surgery, can't be used (such as for infections or necrosis). This new material quickly transforms into real bone.
I like the approach. We had a few articles recently on this approach. Maybe combining some would make sense.
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.
Sounds promising. Might not be a cure by itself - but may be another tool that we have to use in combinational therapies.
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.
This is one of the more promising trials. Val-083 is a new chemotherapy that works similar to the way Temozolomide works, except at a different location, so the MGMT repair enzyme can not undo the damage. If there is a lot of MGMT repair enzyme around, (sometimes pathology reports call this unmethylated MGMT genes) temozolomide has a much smaller chance of helping, so something else is needed.
Sorry - the link I posted yesterday had a space in it and didn't work. It is now fixed.
Intra-arterial avastin has been in trials for GBM for years, but I have not heard of using it for radiation necrosis before. IV Avastin has had some success with the treatment of radiation necrosis, but intra-arterial delivers a much higher dose exactly where it is needed. Will watch this one.
Now that Optune is FDA approved for both newly diagnosed and recurrent GBMs, we would assume all Glioblastoma patients would at least be offered it as a choice but I am hearing from some patients who were never told about it. If you (or a loved one) were diagnosed since Jan 1, 2016 with a GBM, please take this quick 1 question survey! Then we can figure out if more education is needed!
Amazing technology. Hope it becomes available soon!
We are always open to collaborating with other organizations to help fund brain tumor research!
We raise money through our National Walk To End Brain Tumors in May. We request research grant proposals with a deadline of April 15, 2017, so they can be reviewed and the grants awarded as soon as our events are completed!
That is amazing, as doctors have to take a course to get certified in the use of Optune. This means that practically every major brain tumor center in the USA can offer Optune to their patients. There was a 70 percent increase in the survival rate at 4 years for newly diagnosed GBM patients, and Optune is now considered the standard of care for newly diagnosed gbms!
We are officially closed to new patients, but if you need assistance - send in the application anyway by tomorrow (Friday 1/20/17). We have a few pending applications waiting for more info. If they are not approved, we will be able to process a few more. I can't promise they will get funded - but I will try my best.
Amazing how many people need help. I feel bad that we can't help them all.
It would make sense to use Optune with grade 3 brain tumors - would be nice to see the proof. Good luck with the trial!
Chloroquine is a cheap drug approved for treatment of Malaria, and is now being tested against many types of cancer. This article talks about success with 3 patients, and all 3 benefitted. In our brain tumor virtual trial registry, we have 8 patients who tried it. 5 out of the 8 lived over 2 years, and 3 went on to become long term survivors. Note that they also took many other treatments besides Chloroquine, so it is impossible for us to tell if it was due to the Chloroquine, but it may be worth looking at closely
This is an exciting trial. I love the combination. Hope it works!
