Therapy can give years to certain brain cancer patients

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Updated: January 26, 2012 8:14AM

The growing science of personalized medicine has good news for a small group of brain tumor patients, for whom a combination of chemotherapy and radiation has been found to double their survival — to nearly 15 years.

That’s “remarkable” when most new cancer therapies offer only a few more weeks or months of survival, says Dr. Bhupinder Mann, a National Cancer Institute scientist who oversaw the new study.

But the treatment combination doesn’t cure brain tumors, and it doesn’t help everyone. It will be targeted specifically to the roughly 1,000 Americans a year who develop a particular type of brain tumor — anaplastic oligodendrogliomas — and whose tumors carry a particular genetic abnormality called a “co-deletion,” in which sections of chromosomes 1 and 19 are deleted.

“This tumor hits people in their 30s and 40s, in the prime of life,” says Dr. David Reardon, clinical director of neuro-oncology at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “It really highlights the importance of personalized medicine. We know these tumors are not all the same.”

Peoples with oligodendrogliomas typically have been treated with radiation alone. Overall, they lived a median of 4½ years whether or not doctors added chemotherapy, according to the study of 286 people, presented at the annual meeting of the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group.

About half of patients carry the co-deletion, Mann says. Among those with the co-deletion, the ones who received chemotherapy plus radiation survived nearly 15 years, while those who got radiation alone lived 7.3 years, the study found.

Dr. Steven Rosenfeld, who directs the brain tumor center at the Cleveland Clinic, has been following the research closely and already tests his patients for the gene abnormalities.

“It’s very gratifying and good news for the patients diagnosed with these types of tumors,” Rosenfeld says. “But they are, unfortunately a minority.”