Sponsored by
Exciting news. This will hopefully speed up the approval of this immunotherapy for brain tumors! Notice that they mention the Musella Foundation!
Brilliant research. This type of thinking may lead to a major advance quickly. There is research on using this approach for ovarian cancer (in the test tube) that showed good results.
This should be included in the standard of care for newly diagnosed glioblastomas.
(Disclaimer: Novocure, the company that makes Optune, is a sponsor of our organization).
This study says that adding carboplatin to Avastin actually is worse than using Avastin alone for recurrent gbm.
Although it is a small study, impressive results. Sounds similar to a treatment that was done at Duke years ago which also showed good results but for unknown reasons development was stopped.
This edition of the Tocagen newsletter shows that the company has a lot of confidence in their brain tumor treatment. They added Dr. Das as vice president of clinical development and medical affairs. She played a huge part in the FDA approval process for Avastin for GBMS.
They also got approval from the FDA to start a newtrial which if successful will allow them to apply for FDA approval. The newsletter also has links to a lot of presentations made about this treatment, and also mentions the Musella Foundation! (We gave a grant to support preclinical testing of Toca 511 with 5-ALA or tumor treating fields!)
(Disclaimer: Tocagen is a sponsor of our organization)
What a weekend - you don't realize how important a web server is until it has problems:)
The proceeds of the book are donated to us - the Musella Foundation!
This is a very exciting new trial. it has done very well with other types of cancers. We hope it will work the same for brain tumors.
This is a hot topic in neuro-oncology now. The current issue of the Journal of Neurooncology has this article, as well as an editorial about it and a letter in response from Dr Cobbs - who first announced that CMV is present in most GBMs. This article says there is no CMV in brain tumor samples. The editorial says it is a controversy and they are leaning towards CMV not being associated with GBMs. The letter from Dr Cobbs explains how they found the CMV and showed that the methods used in this article did not have a chance of finding the CMV. I tend to think Dr Cobbs is correct and he found a method that can find the CMV. Researchers at Duke were able to confirm the presence of CMV in most or all GBM samples. Other labs were also not able to detect it. What is needed is a standardized test where any lab can do it with the same results. Until that happens, the controversy remains.
This is a very important topic because IF CMV is associated with most GBMs, it presents a target to be used to fight GBMs.
This free NJ program is for kids and teens whose lives have been impacted by a brain tumor
This is one of the grants that I am most proud of. It is usually very hard to get different companies to work together on a project like this, but these 3 companies were eager and willing to work together to speed up the search for the cure!
Exciting new technology for brain tumor surgery!
This type of research is brilliant. It is only in a mouse model, so we do not yet know if it applies to humans. They looked at tumors that became resistant to BCNU and Temodar and found that the changes that allowed the resistance to these drugs opened the door for different drugs to work.
Doxorubicin has been shown to be effective against brain tumor cells in the test tube but it is hard to get a high level of it in the brain so it is not used much today. 10 years ago there was a paper (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1635000/) reporting on using Doxorubicin wafers implanted into rat brain tumor and they did pretty well. It may be time to look at this again especially for recurrent GBMs that became resistant to temodar.
This is great news. Rintega has shown significant advantage in overall survival for recurrent GBMs. Let's hope the FDA approves this quickly.
The National Walk To End Brain Tumors raised over $230,000 this month for the Musella Foundation to use for research. We awarded $210,000 this round and will save the remaining $20,000 to use with the next round of grants. These events were run by individuals who are committed to helping speed up the search for the cure. None of them had prior experience! They all did a fantastic job. If you would like to host a fundraiser for us, just contact me at musella@aol.com
This confirms the good results they reported in the interim analysis a few months ago. 2 year survival for newly diagnosed GBM patients went up from 29% in the standard therapy group to 43% in the standard + Novocure group. More of the details will come out on June 2, 2015. When I discussed the interim results with neuro-oncs , many took the cautious viewpoint of "wait for the full results - it can't be that good". Well - these are the full results and almost as good as the interim results. They also had concern that perhaps a major difference in prognostic factors between the control group and treatment group might account for the difference. Hopefully we will find out in a few days when more details are released.
This sounds like a lot of fun and a great idea! It is a contest with nice prizes to create tools to help GBM patients.
[Disclaimer: Novocure is a sponsor of our organization]
Optune is now available in Japan!
