Sponsored by
This issue is becoming a huge problem. Insurance companies – especially the Obama Care Health Exchanges – are limiting your choice of doctor and hospital. I do not know how they have the right to do that. It doesn’t seem fair or even useful. I am working with the National Brain Tumor Society to try to get a new law passed that would include all NCI designated cancer centers as “in network” for all insurance plans. That would be a good start. Eventually, we should do away with “in network” panels. Health care is too important to allow a bureaucrat to make the decisions for you on which hospitals or doctors to use. My solution would be to do away with network panels all together. Instead, the insurance company can publish a fee schedule that they would pay to any doctor treating the members. They publish a list of doctors who would accept that fee schedule (plus copayments and deductible) as payment in full. This way you can select any doctor you want and the insurance will pay the fee schedule amount. If the doctor you select is on the list, you just pay the copayment and deductible. IF the doctor you select isn’t on the list, you also pay the difference between the regular fee and the fee schedule amount.
The Novocure system is now available in 8 other countries (beside the USA where it was FDA approved a few years ago)!
We have 2 programs open to help pay for your treatments!
hydroxychloroquine is an anti-malaria drug that many cancer patients take because in the lab it helps. This trial tested if it is practical and effective to add to the standard of care for GBM. They found that the dose needed to make it useful was too toxic. All 3 patients at the highest dose had severe to life threatening side effects. The conslusion is that it is not proactical to use this drug but that it may be worth trying to create a new drug to target this pathway with less side effects
This press release talks about a different way to aim the Gamma Knife. Instead of just hitting the tumor, they try to predict the most likely path for it to grow and treat that area also. Sounds like a great idea.
This reinforces the theory that Dr John Boockvar presented at one of our conferences
(see http://virtualtrials.com/video2012.cfm?video=201202) : namely that the most aggressive tumor cells migrate along the blood vessels and those are the ones we need to target. Dr Boockvar is using intra-arterial avastin to target this "tumor cell niche".
This may lead to a better way to treat brain tumors.
When the NovoTTF Therapy was approved by the FDA, they required the company to track the patients who use the treatment. This is the report on the first 457 patients to use it commercially (outside of the trials). It gives a feel for how it works in the real world.
Keep in mind that it does not report on any other treatments patients did. Since it was outside of the trial, patients are allowed to do anything they want in addition to the NovoTTF therapy. There also was no control group to directly compare it to and they did not show historical controls.
The results are remarkable. Usually reports of patients using a treatment in the real world are much worse than those in the trials. In this case the results in the real world are much better than in the trial. I think it may have to do with compliance. If you are paying for it, you have more of a tendency to use it. In the trial, there were many patients who didn't even use it for a month.
Some highlights: 30% of patients survived over 2 years (after recurrence of GBM), and average survival was 9.6 months. It is hard to compare patients directly, but in general most other studies report an average survival of 3-6 months. The large study used to get FDA approval for Avastin for recurrent GBM reported an average of 6 months survival and about a 15% survival at 90 weeks (almost 2 years.)
They broke down the results by compliance - what % of the time the patient actually used the treatment. If used less than 75% of the time, average survival was only 4 months. However, if used over 75% of the time, average survival was 13.5 months.
Good results. I like the idea of adding the checkpoint inhibitor to increase the effect of the vaccine.
This reports that adding BCNU or CCNU to Avastin after Avastin alone fails, did not really help much. Average survival was only 4.5 months
I usually do not include books in the Brain Tumor News Blast, but this is a special one. This has the perfect blend of comedy and pathos woven into this man's story about the first year in his fight against a brain tumor. He discusses a lot of things anyone going through this should know. I highly recommend it.
We received a generous donation to our copayment assistance program which will allow us to open again. It is hard to say how long it will last. $5,000 grants will be awarded on a first come first served basis
When I first heard about using a ketogenic diet to treat brain tumors I thought it was crazy. However, I met this researcher and attended one of her presentations on it where she showed results in mice - comparing radiation alone against radiation plus the ketogenic diet and in the mice studies, there was a big improvement when the diet was added. She is now testing it in people. Too early to tell but this is something that I would keep an eye on
This has to be the most bizzarre situation I ever came across in the brain tumor world. Northwest Bio has a few cancer vaccines in clinical trials, and apparently became the target of website that is trying to manipulate stock prices. Every time this website publishs something negative about the vaccine, the stock dips and there is a lot of money to be made. The stock price eventually rebounds, then they do it again. This type of behavior should be investigated, but the bottom line is not to pay any attention to it. It has nothing to do with the science. It is all about greedy people trying to make money without regard to what it may do to cancer patients.
Interesting, but I caution that we need to see the research before trying it. They say a low dose can make the tumor grow faster while a hig dose inhibits growth... so we need to see exactly what doses are needed... as well as the effect of p53 mutations
This may be a new way to get treatments into the brain tumor.
Some people are using this now for brain tumors.
Itraconazole is an antifungal drug used to treat fungal toenails and other fungal infections. It is very safe with minimal side effects. It has been tested for use in other cancers. A recent study http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2014/02/oral-anti-fungal-drug-can-treat-skin-cancer-in-patients-study-shows.html showed that it can reduce the size of skin cancers.
Interesting study... it says if your blood glucose goes too high during radiation, your survival may be cut in half.
This may fit in perfectly with another article mentioned in this News Blast on Metformin, which can help control the blood glucose levels. Perhaps controlling blood glucose during radiation or when using steroids may help.
