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I have talked about Val-083 a lot over the last year. The trial is finally open. This is a great option for recurrent GBM patients with unmethylated MGMT.
This is an open label trial - which means we should be able to find out how good it works quickly. Hopefully by the end of this year.
There is no mention of why there was a hold in the first place. It makes no sense to me that they have to wait for 233 people to die before they can analyze the data. If we ever have a cure, these methods insure that we will never see it because the trials would never end.
This is a blog post from the chairman of the company that makes Val-083. I think this trial will accrue patients faster than they predict as the early results are impressive and there really are not many competing trials looking for this patient population: Patients with GBM who have failed Avastin and have unmethylated MGMT. Worth looking at this trial.
This is an international collaboration to try to find the cure of DIPG. DIPG is a rare brain tumor that mostly affects children. Since it is so rare, no one institution has enough patients to figure out the answers we need to cure this devastating disease. By working together, it will greatly speed up the progress.
The Musella Foundation is mentioned in the article as one of the funders!
These 2 new approvals should help make brain tumor surgery safer, and also may turn some inoperable tumors into operable ones!
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!
