The Boca Raton Regional Hospital is one of four locations selected to continue a clinical trial for a deadly brain tumor. The FDA has designed the trial as a “breakthrough therapy.”
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The trial uses engineered poliovirus as a treatment for glioblastoma.
“It is certainly a devastating diagnosis because of the inability to completely cure this type of disease,” said Frank Vrionis, Director of the Marcus Neuroscience Institute at the hospital.
Vrionis said the first phase of the clinical trial has shown amazing results so far. The first phase at Duke University had 61 patients with glioblastoma tested with the engineered polio. Twenty-one percent of the patients were still alive after three years, compared to 4 percent in historical controls.
“We bypass the blood-brain barrier by putting a specific catheter inside the tumor and then do a very slow infection of the medication,” said Vrionis.
Vrionis said they see a lot of patients with malignant brain tumors and recognize they could see patients from the St. Lucie County area where WPTV uncovered more than a dozen people diagnosed with Glioblastoma.
They have to have certain size tumors, a certain location, they must be able to have a certain ability to function independently,” said Vronis.
MNI is enrolling patients for the clinical trial right now and expect to begin in the next month. For information on the trial, you can all 561-955-4800.