Our next webinar will be on Sunday Oct 9, 2022 at 7PM eastern.  This will be about Plus Therapeutics' experimental therapy called Rhenium-186 NanoLiposome (186RNL). The trial is for Recurrent Glioblastoma, Pediatric Brain Cancer as well as Leptomeningeal Metastases. This webinar will focus on the Leptomeningeal Metastases part of the trial but also applies to those other tumors mentioned!

  The free webinar will be presented live in our Zoom room where it is easy to ask questions, but we will also try to broadcast it on Facebook. After the event we will post the video on our website, virtualtrials.org, as well as on Facebook and Youtube.  If you like to ask questions, our zoom room is the easiest.

 This is in clinical trials now. If it works, it has the potential for a major breakthrough - there are many treatments that kill the brain tumors in the lab but do not work in people because of the blood brain barrier. This new device opens the blood brain barrier temporarily to allow treatments to get where they are needed! And it sounds a lot safer and easier for the patient than alternative ways around the blood brain barrier. Good luck to them with this trial!

 This gives a great overview of the work being done to treat diffuse midline gliomas and DIPG.   We helped fund the project through our partnership with the DIPG Collaborative.

 This is remarkable results for a vaccine therapy.  This is the first reported results of a treatment used for brain tumors under the Right To Try law.   They treated patients with recurrent Glioblastoma who historically lived an average of 8 months.  With this treatment, average survival was 19.6 months, with 25% of patients alive at the end of the trial at about the 40 month mark.   They are tweaking the protocol to make it work even better. There was minimal side effects.     

 Gamma Tile is FDA approved and available at many other major hospitals. If you are about to have a surgery for a malignant brain tumor - primary or metastatic, it is worth asking your doctor about it.

 This new type of treatment - Sonodynamic therapy - is one of my favorites as it is so elegant.  A dye is given to the patient, and the dye accumulates mostly in the tumor cells.  Then they apply MRI guided focused ultrasound to the area of the tumor. The focused ultrasound excites the dye molecules which kills the tumor cells and leaves the normal cells unharmed. This is not invasive - the focused ultrasound it applied using a helmet like device.  The trial is now open for DIPG as well as Glioblastoma. Although we have no results yet, it is worth considering. Theoretically it harms only tumor cells, and can be repeated as often as needed.  

 I usually write these books on my own and have an editor format them and convert my writing to real English.  This time I had a lot of help:   Channah Piscioneri  and Linda Singer  did most of the work this time. A huge thanks to them. I couldn't have done it without them. 

 This is from our good friends at the University of Florida Brain Tumor Center! Sounds like fun!

 This  life saving program ran out of funding again.   It is funded entirely by donations that are earmarked for this program. We do not use donations that are not specifically for this program.   If you would like to make a donation, go to virtualtrials.org/donate and select 'for copay program' when you make the donation!

 This is from our good friends at Cancer Commons!   They are going to try to make it easy to understand for those few out there that are not PhDs in Biochemistry!  They will explain the different types of testing and who needs which types, and the benefits of testing. They will talk about brain tumors but it applies to all cancer types. The webinar is  free and will take place on September 14, 2022, at 12:00 PM PT / 3:00 PM ET.  Follow the link to register.  A recording of it will be available on their website a few days later.

 This is a video about an exciting new clinical trial for recurrent Glioblastoma, which the Musella Foundation helped fund!   The video explains why they think this oral drug may work!

   This $25,000 grant moves us ahead of the yearly brain tumor research grant totals for each of the last 2 years!  We gave out $505,000 for brain tumor research so far this year!   We gave out $427,000 in 2021 and  $500,292 in 2020.  The most we ever gave out in one year, pre-pandemic, was $625,695.00 in 2018!  Hopefully we will get back to that level next year!   

 The compassionate use program is for patients with pediatric diffuse midline glioma (DMG) and DIPG. OKN-007 is an experimental drug that works on the tumor microenvironment.  See https://oblatoinc.com/our-science/#01 for details.    

There are also clinical trials going on for this drug for both newly diagnosed and recurrent Glioblastoma. I am excited about this drug - as we (the Musella Foundation) gave them one of their first brain tumor research grants to get this drug started 9 years ago and have been keeping up with their research since then.

xCures is running the expanded access program for Oblato.  (Disclaimer: I am a paid consultant to xCures).  This program is being run the way all expanded access programs should be run - and the way we ran the original Onc-201 trial- collect the data from the patients the same as if in a regular trial so we can learn from every patient's experiences. This data can be used to confirm the data from the trials and hopefully speed up FDA and insurance approvals. 

If you have a pediatric DIPG or DMG, go to https://xcures.com/details/okn007/ for details. For patients with Glioblastomas, contact our patient navigation program for help.

We gave out two grants today:

We have been foundational partners to the Children's Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) for many years.  The CBTN operates a centralized tumor tissue repository where all of the samples have a complete genomic analysis and medical history. This resource is shared with the research community allowing for projects to be done that would be impossible without resources like this. The best use of the data is when a drug company develops a drug for adult cancers, they can use this resource to see if there are any pediatric brain tumors that might be helped by the drug.  This data has been used by 289 pediatric brain tumor research projects so far, and there are over 4,500 patients.

The second grant is unique - there is a clinical trial just starting and the researchers were wondering if the microbiome of the gut influences the response to the drugs in the trial.  It has been shown to have an influence in other cancers.  They asked us to fund this add on study.  We gave out so many grants recently that we ran out of money in our grant fund.  I asked the Cure Starts Now to split the grant with us, and they immediately agreed and paid half of the grant! Thanks to the Cure Starts Now we were able to quickly fund this worthwhile project!

 Dr. Tessler, the neurosurgeon who did the awake surgery on this  patient, is one of my favorite neurosurgeons and is on our medical advisory board.   

 They reported median survival of 20  months for recurrent glioblastoma.  84% alive 1 year after starting treatment.   This is unheard of and is a breakthrough in brain tumor treatments.  It was a single arm trial so no randomized controls, but we would expect 8-9 months.    It is approved in Japan, but we can not get it in the USA. I tried asking the company to open a trial or expanded access here and they do not want to yet, because of our regulatory system.  We need to change this now.   

 This is a potential game changer.   These authors looked for biomarkers that can predict success for Optune users, and found that a score composed of 3 biomarkers could differentiate between patients who do exceedingly well and those that do not. The difference is tremendous:   If your score was high, overall survival with Optune was about 82% at 45 months, compared to about 16% without Optune. 

Of course I would love for this to be validated in another group of patients  but the difference is so large we should consider it now when making decisions.   

If you have a high score, it makes sense to use Optune instead of a clinical trial that doesn't allow Optune use,  No clinical trial has ever shown the results this study has.

If you have a low score, either enter a clinical trial, or use Optune but add treatments that counteract the biomarkers..

These results were for Optune patients with poor compliance and were stll impressive. I would love to see the results with high compliance.

 We helped fund this project  (through the DIPG Collaborative).  It shows that a liquid biopsy of CSF or even Blood can tell if the patient is responding or not to Onc-201.  With DIPG it is hard to tell how the tumor is doing with just MRIs.  It also shows impressive results for Onc-201!

 Although median survival wasn't helped much, 10% were alive at 4 years and one was progression free at 5 years.

 Cancer Commons has been a partner of ours for our Patient Navigation Program for the last few years.  We are constantly improving the system and xCures has just completed the next genertion of artificial intelligence tools for us to use... they are in testing now but we will use them for this project which we hope can prove that our learning system can directly increase patient survival.   

We are looking for partners to help fund and run this exciting program. If interested, contact me (Al Musella, DPM at  musella@virtualtrials.org)