Cleveland Plain Dealer: Case Western Reserve medical school to collaborate in brain-tumor research
Angela Townsend
Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine is one of nine institutions invited to collaborate on a project that researchers hope will help them understand how genetic differences in brain tumors can predict the most effective treatment for a patient.
Last week the California-based Ben and Catherine Ivy Foundation, created to help improve survival and quality of life for people with brain tumors, gave $3 million for the Ivy Genomics-Based Medicine Project, to be divided among the nine institutions, including Ohio State University.
"I suspect we will get a lot farther because we've agreed to share data than we would as individual centers working separately," said Dr. Andrew Sloan, an associate professor of neurological surgery at Case.
He leads many of the clinical trials at UniversityHospitals Case Medical Center's Neurological Institute and the IrelandCancer Center.
The project is coming up with various brain-tumor treatments that will be tested with patients.
The concept has been tested in other types of cancers, but money for this kind of brain-tumor research has largely been unavailable, Sloan said.
The first stage, creating treatments based on a tumor's genetic profile,starts this month and will last about 18 months. A clinical trial for patients with recurrent glioblastoma multiforme will begin if the first stage is successful.
Doctors usually talk about overall success rates of certain drugs and how often side effects occur.
"The problem is, you [as the patient] don't really care so much ho well it's going to work in other people," Sloan said. "You want to know how well it's going to work in you."
If the Ivy GBM Project is successful, it could pave the way for doctors to look at a tumor's genetic material and figure out from that which drug has the best chance of working, Sloan said.