Al's Comment:

This is the publication of one of the projects we (the Musella Foundation)  helped fund.  The concept is perfect and elegant - select the best treatment plan for a child with DIPG based on the biological makeup of the tumor.  Each patient was reviewed by a board of experts and they decided on up to 4 approved drugs to use in combination to treat the kids.   This is similar to how our patient navigation program works except we do not limit ourselves to approved treatments.

 There was no improvement in survival for these kids comparing those that followed the recommendations and those that did not follow the recommendations.  . Overall survival was 13.1 months - which is somewhat  better than the accepted median survival for these tumors.  They did not compare to external controls, but both groups did better than expected. Perhaps the group that did not follow the recommendations were accepted into a clinical trial that is helping. 

They did learn a few things as noted in the article, which lays the groundwork for the next iteration of this project  Unfortunately they can not yet use treatments  like Onc-201 or DCVAX because they are not approved yet.  Hopefully that will change soon.

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Posted on: 08/11/2022

Upfront Biology-Guided Therapy in Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma: Therapeutic, Molecular, and Biomarker Outcomes from PNOC003 

 

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