Sponsored by
This is more of a get together than a fundraiser. I would love to meet in person those of you who I only speak to online!
Tickets are $75 each (Would cost over $100 at the box office). To buy tickets, go to virtualtrials.com/yankees
If that is too expensive for you, contact me and we have a few tickets that we can give away - but they go fast, so reply to this email immediately if interested! Preference given to brain tumor patients and their families - so mention that in your email!
Please pass this along to your friends!
Valium may help slow down the tumor... very interesting.
This is the type of thinking I love to see. I have always thought that the cure is going to be in a well thought out cocktail of drugs - such as an anti-angiogenesis drug which does work pretty well for a while, as well as targetted therapies that shut down all of the possible resistance pathways. Perhaps throw in other treatments such as vaccines and tumor treating fields and we may hit a home run someday soon.
This article talks about the outcomes for GBM patients treated with the standard treatments in Iran. Average progression free survival was 6 months and average survival was 11 months. Only 7% of patients had a complete resection.
Here in the USA, a much higher % of patients get complete resections, and the average survival with standard treatments is over 18 months. There are some small trials that reported overall survivals of 38 months.
This points out the need not only for us to find the best treatments but to make sure they get out to the rest of the world. WIth the latest treatments being so expensive, that might not happen for a long time or ever. Something has to be done about that. I have no idea how to approach it. Any ideas?
This is one of my favorite neurosurgeons.. when I first heard about him using Avastin in the way, I thought it was crazy, but after having him explain the thinking behind it, it makes a lot of sense. I videotaped his explanation - go to www.virtualtrials.com/video2012.cfm for the video.
This might be a better way to use Avastin.
This will make the work with mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) much easier for the patient - in the research being done in the past, they would have to remove bone marrow, which hurts a lot. Now it would be something like liposuction (kill 2 birds with one stone - you get stem cells and also lose weight:).
From our friends at The David S. Zocchi Brain Tumor Center
Avastin has been used for treating radiation necrosis but this is the first time I heard of it being used to treat symptomatic pseudoprogression. I guess it makes sense. This article talks about using BNCT, which was tried decades ago and failed - but the technology has advanced to the point where it is promising again. Combining BNCT with Avastin might make a big impact. It might allow higer doses of radiation with less harm. Very interesting.
This is only in mice so far.. but very exciting. Will keep my eyes on this one.. The good news is this drug - also known as Sprycel - is approved for Leukemia, so it is readily avaialable off label.
There was a lot of hope for this drug. Failing the clinical trial does not mean that it is useless. It means that it didn't work in the manner that they used it, which is in combination with the standard treatments. This drug has many effects on the tumor cells: it inhibits cell migration, differentiation, angiogenesis, wound healing, immune and non-immune defense mechanisms, and oncogenic transformation.
It's place may be in combination with other targeted agents and/or vaccines in a well thought out cocktail approach. I hope research on this continues.
I sent a similiar story out in the last news blast, but this article points out that they are still testing this drug on GBM patients with an unmethylated MGMT gene promoter status. These tumors do not respond as well to the standard treatment, and adding a little something extra like this drug may help. Reading between the lines, now that they have the results of the big phase 3 trial, they probably analyzed the outcome in patients who have the methylated vs unmethylated status and must have seen it is worth continuing the trial on unmethylated patients.
A little background on methylation status: there is a test that can determine what % of cells in the tumor have methylated or unmethylated MGMT promotor genes. If the gene is methylated, the gene becomes inactive and can not be used to produce the MGMT protien, which is a repair enzyme. Chemotherapy, such as Temodar, work by damaging the DNA in cells so they can not reproduce. MGMT repairs the damage, which makes the tumor resistent to chemotherapy. So a person who has a high % of methylated MGMT genes will have less repair enzyme and thus better response to chemotherapy than someone who has a low % of methylated MGMT genes.
This make a huge difference. Time to progression of the tumor is half as long in people who have the unmethylated MGMT gene compared to people who have the methylated status.
From our friends at the Chris Elliott Fund.. Sounds worthwhile.
This project tested multiple samples from each tumor to see if there were variations within the same tumor, and found striking differences which may have a mahor effect on treatments. If true (and this was a small study which needs to be repeated), then the concept of personalized medicine - targetting the tumor's specific mutations - might not work, as they found different parts of the tumor had different subtypes.
The "Warburg effect" is an observation that cancer cells usually metabolize glucose differently than normal cells. These researchers are trying to change the process back to how it is in normal cells using a relatively simple chemical. This is only in the test tube now and more research is needed before we can tell if it works in people.
Obviously, everyone likes massages, but this study shows that it can significantly help brain tumors patients psychologically as well as making them fel better. Worth a try!
In the last news blast, I talked about using the anti-viral (anti CMV) Valcyte for GBMs. Today I came across a report on a trial for Valcyte with standard therapy for GBMS. This was a randomized trial - half get standard treatment and half get Valcyte for 6 months in addition to standard treatment.
The trial allowed patients to stay on Valcyte after the 6 months if they wanted to and they allowed the control group to switch to Valcyte - which complicates the interpretation.. as patients who were doing well probably stayed on the valcyte while those doing poorly probably stopped... so take this as an indication that it might help - not proof..
There was a small difference on scans but a big difference on overall survival: OS at 4 years was 27.3% in patients who used Valcyte for over 6 motnhs versus 5.9% in controls (P = 0.0466).
This is fascinating. There was a lot of talk at the recent Society of Neuro-oncology conference about cytomegalovirus and Glioblastomas. Various groups reported all or almost all gbm samples tested had this virus. Now for the first time, this article shows that there is a very strong correlation between survival and how much virus is in the tumor. Low levels of the virus were associated with a higher survival. The group with the lowest infection level had 2 year survival rate of 63% compared to 17% in the high infection group, and the overall survivals was 20 months longer in the low infection group compared to the high infection group.
This may mean that CMV causes or at least helps make a gbm more resistent to treatment and more deadly.
The good news is that there are relatively simple treatment available for CMV infections - such as Valcyte. There is a trial going on now to see if Valcyte can help treat GBMs. There is also a vaccine trial going on that targets CMV.
