NEWS RELEASE

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 Nov. 4, 2020 

 

Contact: Al Musella, DPM

President

Musella Foundation For Brain Tumor Research & Information, Inc

888-295-4740

Musella@virtualtrials.org

 

 

Hewlett, NY-  The Musella Foundation For Brain Tumor Research & Information, Inc is very excited to announce the launch of our newly designed website: virtualtrials.org.

 

 The concept was to simplify the massive “Clinical Trials and Noteworthy Treatments For Brain Tumors”  website and make it mobile friendly, faster and easier to navigate and read. 

 

Major changes to the website include:

 

1. We partnered with our friends at Cancer Commons and xCures to create an amazing new service for our patients to help them find the best treatment options for their specific circumstances.  This is called “A Patient-Centric Platform Trial for Precision Oncology” and is listed on Clinicaltrials.gov at https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03793088

 

To participate, go to virtualtrials.org and click on “FIND TREATMENTS” then “FULL SERVICE”.

 

We will then ask for your medical records and our team of nurse navigators, research scientists, internal board of domain experts, and sometimes an external virtual tumor board will go through your case, considering your wishes on how aggressive or experimental you want to try, and come up with a list of what we think is the best treatment options for you. You and your doctor can pick which one you want to try and if you have trouble getting access to it we try to help. We then follow up on your case to track the outcome so we learn from every patient, and the system gets better with time.

 

We have been testing it for about 2 years and already about 500 patients used this service.  Not everyone did well but we had some amazing successes that probably wouldn’t have happened without our help.

 

2. The new website changes the way you can look for clinical trials. We partnered with another nonprofit, Clinwiki, to make clinical trials listings more understandable.  In addition to the improved way to search and sort the trials, we added a “Lay Summary” with a plain English explanation of what the trial is, how it works, the Pros and Cons, who the ideal patient is and a way for the public to write reviews about the trials.  

 

3. Activism Alerts.  We contracted with Congress Plus to enable us to use their tool for our members to easily write to Congress on important issues. We have two important bills that need support now. Go to virtualtrials.org and look for the activism alerts to learn about them and to write letters!

 

Our old website, virtualtrials.com is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, website dedicated to brain tumor treatments.  We started on Compuserve in 1993 and moved to the web in 1994 under one of our volunteers’ domain name, then moved to virtualtrials.com in 1996.  

 

We formed the Musella Foundation in 1997 and was awarded nonprofit status the following year.  We did not switch to the .org domain at that time as we had too many links published in printed directories – such as the NCI and NIH guides – which were difficult to change.  

 

We added materials to the website a few times a week for over 25 years and it became unwieldy.  It was overdue for a facelift.  When we created the new website, we took the opportunity to change the domain to .org!

 

The old website was made up of over 28,000 files, using up 13 gigabyte of hard drive space, not including our video library which is hosted on Youtube and Vimeo, as well as our database which stores the news articles, treatment information and virtual trial data – which takes up another 7 gigabytes of MS SQL server database space! The new website is made up of about 8,000 files.  

 

In the last year, we had approximately 500,000 visitors to the website, according to Google Analytics. To put that in perspective, CBTRUS reports that there are about 415,000 new brain tumor diagnoses in the USA every year (including benign, malignant and metastatic tumors).  

 

Check out the new website at virtualtrials.org and let us know of any comments!

 

 

The Musella Foundation For Brain Tumor Research & Information, Inc is a 501(c)3 non- profit organization dedicated to speeding up the search for the cure of brain tumors, as well as helping families deal with the diagnosis of brain cancer, by funding innovative brain tumor research, education, advocacy, emotional and financial support for families that are dealing with brain tumors and organizing the brain tumor community to work together as an army to fight the disease.