New Drug Therapy Holds Hope for Brain-Cancer Patients
Duke researchers believe they've found a therapy combination that works for many brain-cancer patients for whom other treatments have failed.
Posted — UpdatedTwo years ago, 29-year-old Tiffany Phillips found it harder to be a mother to her kids. She couldn't even finish the last few courses she needed to earn a college degree in biology at North Carolina Central University.
Tests showed she had anaplastic cytoma, a Grade 3 malignant glioma, which is a fast-growing brain tumor.
She was asked if she felt any pain. Phillips said, "It was no pain. I didn't have any pain."
Radiation didn't help, and the tumor grew back even faster after chemotherapy treatments stopped. Surgery was too risky because Phillips' tumor is deep in the thalamus, the master control center of the brain.
Vredenburgh included Tiffany in a 68-patient clinical trial for a type of chemotherapy called cpt-11 plus another drug called Avastin. Today, Avastin is approved for use with metastatic colorectal cancer and lung cancer.
The tumor already has caused some irreversible damage in Tiffany's brain, but Hinton says her daughter has made great progress. She's learning to work around some of her short-term memory problems by writing things down more.
Vredenburgh credits Avastin for the dramatic improvement in many patients like Phillips in the trial.
Avastin does come with certain risks, like raised blood pressure, increased protein in the urine and increased blood clots in the legs, so it's been used only where other therapies have failed. Phillips met the strict criteria that Duke requires for its trial.
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