![]() This quickly led to larger studies which largely ended in disappointment." "Initial enthusiasm was high, as there were two or three patients who had remarkable complete remissions. "The findings remind me of the previous studies injecting gliomas with the polio virus under similar circumstances," wrote Brandes in an email. "The overall survival of about 12 months was longer than average in a population of recurrent disease."īut he added a note of caution because scientists don't yet know how this combination therapy compares to other treatments. Brandes is an oncologist from Winnipeg who reviewed the study for CTV News. "It's the first time that we've just demonstrated different immune subtypes of a glioblastoma that has a complete direct bearing on response to this treatment," said Zadeh. Researchers also report they discovered for the first time that patients with recurrent glioblastomas have three genetic types when it comes to responding to this immune combination therapy, which Zadeh described as "hot, cold or intermediate immune markers."Īfter performing genetic tests on tumour samples, scientists found that all six of the patients who improved had the intermediate type, suggesting this biomarker, if validated with more study, may help doctors decide who might benefit from the novel combination treatment. "Seeing some of our patients alive three-plus years after treatment is something that we previously would have never thought or imagined to be possible," said Nassiri. The study reports that the combination was safe, and had no unexpected side effects. "It's really the first time where we're now taking a therapy that's novel at part of surgery and combining it with a second therapy that's novel outside of surgery after surgery is completed," he added. Farshad Nassiri, a senior neurosurgery resident at the Krembil Brain Institute at UHN. "So it's really a kind of a paradigm shift for us, and the way that we treat brain tumors," said Dr. Because of the viral infection, doctors say, more of the cancer cells are now likely visible to the immune system because of the treatment-induced inflammation. That allows the patient's immune cells to better find and kill cancer cells. Pembrolizumab is an anti-PD1 drug, part of a new class of medications that rev up the patient's immune system. The treatment also causes an inflammatory reaction in the cancer cells that remain.Ī week later, patients began receiving IV infusions of a cancer immunotherapy drug. The virus (called DNX-2401, or oncolytic virus) is engineered to infect glioblastoma cancer cells and kill them. ![]() Researchers first injected a modified cold virus directly into the patient's brain tumour through a small hole in the skull. The experimental therapy was tested on 49 patients with glioblastomas that had recurred between 20 at 15 hospitals in the U.S. It's the same cancer that took the life of Canadian singer-songwriter Gord Downie in 2017. There is no established treatment after that, making glioblastomas fatal. Glioblastomas have been among the most dreaded cancers because even after the initial tumour is removed with surgery, followed by radiation and chemotherapy, cancer usually returns seven or eight months later. "His MRI brain scans remain completely disease free," she said in an interview with CTV News. "If he wasn't my own patient, I would have really had a hard time believing that this result is true, but he's living he's well, " said Zadeh, who is also a physician at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto. Zadeh says one man in Canada is still doing well 69 months (nearly six years) after the experimental treatment. ![]() Some lived 40 months or 48 months, and two patients had complete remissions and are still alive. Survival in this small group was also much longer. Most intriguing, say researchers, is that six patients saw their tumours shrink by at least 50 per cent on an MRI scan. Gelareh Zadeh, a neurosurgeon and co-director of the Krembril Brain Institute at the University Health Network in Toronto. It's almost double what an individual person would have lived," said study lead author Dr. "We have a 50 per cent overall increased survival, which is remarkable. was about 12.5 months – longer than the average six- to eight-month lifespan for patients with glioblastomas that return despite aggressive treatment. The study, published in the journal Nature, reports the overall survival rate among the 49 glioblastoma patients treated in Canada and the U.S. Canadian scientists say they've tested a unique one-two punch to treat patients with a deadly form of brain cancer, finding that in a small subset of patients, it stopped their tumour from growing or eliminated it.
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