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This is amazing. I never heard of patients in the USA being tested or treated for this, and they say a significant % of patients who are CMV positive will have a reactivation of the CMV infection in the brain when the immune system is depressed with steroids and radiation. Treating it may reduce symptoms and hopefully prolong life.
You can never make decisions based on individual case reports but they are nice to see. Gliadel has been neglected by some medical centers. On average, it adds a little extra time before the tumor progresses, sometimes allowing time for other treatments to have a chance at working. It was never meant to be a cure by itself. We do not have enough patients in our brain tumor virtual trial (virtualtrials.com) to make a statistically significant statement about it, but taking a look at just our long term (over 5 year) GBM survivors, 5 out of the 21 (24%) have used Gliadel as part of the plan. Looking at all GBM patients, 36 out of 469 (8%) have used Gliadel. To me this means that if Gliadel had no effect, you would expect the same % of patients who used it as the % of long term survivors who use it. But we see a tripling of the %, which means Gliadel does have a big increase (possibly tripling) in the chances of becoming a long term survivor, and it should be studied more in depth.
These are puzzling results. Avastin increased the time to progression by over 100% compared to chemotherapy, but the overall survival time was about 30% less. This doesn't make sense. This brings up the question of quality vs quantity of life. Patients did well for twice as long using Avastin, but died sooner. What is worth more? I would like to find out why the people in the Avastin group didn't live as long as those in the chemotherapy group. I wonder if the chemotherapy group used Avastin after recurrence?
This treatment is now in a phase 2/3 trial for recurrent gbm, available in over 35 centers across the USA and Canada! Go to https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT02414165 for details!
Impressive results.
Great news! This is one of my favorite trials, and they are now open! This is a stock vaccine - which means you do not need fresh tumor tissue to make the vaccine. It is a relatively simple blood draw and shot in the arm.
This is another of my favorite treatments. The video explains how the Toca 5 trial works! We are planning on launching a fundraising campaign to help speed up development of this exciting treatment!
Our National Walk To End Brain Tumors was a big success! Thanks to all of our volunteers!
We will be sending out a mailing introducing our new Immunotherapy research fund soon! Watch for it or go to https://virtualtrials.com/immunotherapy_fund.cfm for details!
We already knew this - but strangely I hear of many patients who do not get Temozolomide at the same time as radiation for Anaplastic Astrocytomas. This article should hopefully change that.
This is impressive results from a small study. There is a large multicenter trial going on now for recurrent high grade glioma and they will soon start one for newly diagnosed.
And they acknowledge the Musella Foundation (and other brain tumor foundation) grant support for this project! This is your generous donations at work!
It might not be open long, so if you are thinking of applying, do it quickly!
There is a new classification of brain tumors! This will allow better comparisons among patients. For example, glioblastoma is now separated into IDH mutant and IDH wild type glioblastomas. In some studies, the difference in survival between these 2 groups is actually more than the difference that the treatment being studied makes.
This sounds like a great combination. Radiosurgery can usually control an individual brain met over 90% of the time, however the patient usually still develops new mets in the brain - because the radiosurgery doesn't do anything for the little islands of tumor cells that you can't yet see on the scans. The TTFields might be able to stop those islands from developing into new tumors.
Pretty good results in early testing. The great part of this is they can turn the immune response on and off and possibly control the intensity by varying the oral component.
This company has put together a dream team of some of the top brain tumor experts in the field. They are running a clinical trial of a new device using radiofrequencies to stop gbm tumor growth
Very important research! Finding a single point mutation that may be responsible for DIPG and other types of cancer is amazing because it presents a target that can be attacked.
I thought that Avastin crossed the blood brain barrier but this experiment, in mice, shows that opening up the blood brain barrier using a relatively simple application of focused ultrasound leads to vastly improved outcomes and much higher concentration of Avastin in the brain. There is a trial in humans now of administering Avastin via intra-arterial infusion directly into the tumor. We do not have the results yet, but this experiment gives hope that the principle of increasing the dosage to the tumor may work in people!
This project was funded by the Musella Foundation. It shows a new way of enhancing the effect of Temodar on Glioblastomas (in the lab at this point), in cells that overexpress either wild type or mutated P53 gene.
