froggmister
Re: None
Saturday, November 18, 2023 2:46:09 PM
Post#
648653
of 654707
SNO 2023 DCVax-L discussion transcript from PeerView X account, courtesy ATLinsider.
Note - I did the best I could with Dr. Ashkan's accent.
1:03:48: Manmout Ahluwalia: …there is also work with DCVax which Dr. Brem was involved with that study. Dr. Brem, do you want to highlight the data from that…
Dr. Stephen Brem: We have an expert, Dr. Keyoumars Ashkan from London who is the second author to Linda Liau on our paper in JAMA Oncology this year and I was talking with him before the meeting and things are moving forward, and…do you want to comment?
Dr. Ashkan: Thank you very much Steve. Yes, most of you may have heard about DCVax which is a personalized form of treatment. What was very specific in Dr. King’s presentation was that the many difficulties of glioblastomas is that they are very heterogeneous – no two tumors are the same. So what does that mean? So surgical therapies – and I’m a surgeon – can never be the answer because we cannot resect every single cell. You’ll remember that there were cases of spinal cord GBM, and people transacted about the core, and guess what? There is still GBM many many years later. And secondly because they are so heterogeneous the blanket of treatment, radiotherapy, chemotherapy cannot work because you are dealing with an extremely difficult tumor. The way to address that would be to make the treatment totally personalized to that patient. And in my mind there’s nothing stronger than using the patient's own tumor to produce the treatment, and there’s nothing stronger in my mind than immunotherapy, just like we managed to achieve with COVID. So in view of that you may have seen the results which were published last year in JAMA Oncology which showed that in newly diagnosed GBMs there was an average of a 3 month overall survival benefit compared to external controls, and in the methylated cohort that was 9 months. There was also in recurring GBMs, there was evidence of survival benefit over 6 months and was the first study in 28 years to show an actual benefit in recurring GBM that we haven’t seen elsewhere.
So obviously the next step is to get this drug approved in the UK, where it seems a bit simpler, more efficient pathway to approval which is good news, and we are trying to get the drug approved first in the UK and then beyond that we can move on to the US’s FDA, ect., and so as we speak we are preparing submissions to the MHRA, which is the UK version of the FDA, for regulatory approval and hopefully in the next few months we will hear back. So that was a very quick statement, thank you very much.
AI
