The IBTA’s monthly e-News has been released and has emailed to all subscribers. Emailed to over 5,000 people around the globe, including clinicians, patients, researchers and others, it gives a round-up of the latest research and treatment developments, news about brain tumour patient organisations around the world, and key forthcoming neuro-oncology scientific and patient conferences. You can sign up to receive the e-News every month by registering here.
This month’s highlights
You can read the IBTA e-News January 2023 edition in full online here.
Some highlights from this month’s round-up:
- The first international recommendations on the use of item libraries for patient-reported outcome measurement in oncology have been published in The Lancet Oncology. This important work carried out by Claire Piccinin et al addresses the need for more flexible ways to capture the patient voice, while preserving the rigour of standard (static) questionnaires.
- Patients with low-grade glioma who have a ‘maximal’ surgical resection of their tumour soon after diagnosis survive longer overall and live longer before the tumour transforms into a high-grade glioma, according to findings in a large, multinational study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
- In a series of experiments reported in Science: Translational Medicine, and using ‘humanised’ mice (mice with a human-like immune system) with glioblastomas, researchers extracted and genetically edited a sample of cells from the tumours using a technique called CRISPR-Cas9 to alter the DNA of these glioblastoma cells to create ‘therapeutic tumour cells’ (ThTCs), which carried specific proteins on their surface that would stimulate the immune system to attack and also trigger other tumour cells to self-destruct (termed apoptosis).
- A study published in Neuro-Oncology Practice has examined the impact that a primary brain tumour diagnosis has on family caregivers with regard to their own unmet needs, and which cover a wide range of issues. Seventy-one caregivers of primary brain tumour patients completed a screening survey to identify areas where they had unmet caregiver needs.
- Having eczema appears to significantly lower an adult’s risk of developing a brain tumour, according to a study published in BMC Cancer. In this meta-analysis, researchers gathered and analysed 20 studies covering over five million patients that investigated the relationship between eczema and brain cancer. The study found that the risk of developing any brain cancer fell by 18% in people aged over 16 who had been diagnosed with eczema.
- In a series of animal and cell experiments published in Science Translational Medicine, researchers have found that an experimental drug, named YTX-7739, which impairs cells’ ability to manufacture fats from sugars (termed ‘de novo lipid synthesis’) will also slow the growth of glioblastoma tumours in mice as well as make their tumours more sensitive to temozolomide chemotherapy, suggesting it as a potential future therapy.
- A two-drug combination has the potential to treat group 3 medulloblastomas, the medulloblastoma subgroup with the worst prognosis, according to research published in the Journal for Immunotherapy in Cancer.
- In a press release, Day One Biopharmaceuticals has released ‘positive’ topline results from its phase 2 FIREFLY-1 trial (NCT04775485) of its anticancer therapy tovorafenib (DAY101) in paediatric patients with recurrent or progressive low-grade glioma (pLGG). The oral drug inhibits a key enzyme (RAF kinase) involved in tumour growth and may help treat tumours carrying a fusion alteration in the BRAF gene, a group of tumours for which there are no approved systemic therapies.
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