Posted: 4 April 2023
A world-first clinical trial platform is set to transform research into new therapies for brain cancer, delivering more targeted, personalised treatment for patients.
The Brain-POP (brain perioperative) clinical trial platform enables doctors to precisely see the effect of a new drug therapy on a patient’s brain cancer for the first time, by comparing tumour samples before and after treatment.
The new platform is led by The Brain Cancer Centre and research partners WEHI, the Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH), Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, the Royal Children’s Hospital and the University of Melbourne, with $16 million in funding support from the Victorian Government.
Clinical trial options
Dr Jim Whittle, laboratory head at WEHI/The Brain Cancer Centre, and medical oncologist at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and RMH, said Brain-POP would begin to address the critical lack of trial options available to brain cancer patients and enable research discoveries to be rapidly translated into the clinic.
“The lack of progress over the last 30 years shows the need to radically change the way drugs are developed and the way clinical trials are run for brain cancer,” Dr Whittle said.
“The Brain-POP platform offers a unique approach to help us test whether a drug actually gets into the brain and find out if it’s having the effect we want.
“We need to invest our efforts into the most powerful and promising therapies, stopping the development of those that don’t work and delivering far better outcomes for brain cancer patients.”
Personalised treatment
The first clinical trial to use the new platform has begun recruitment and focuses on patients with low grade glioma, a type of slow-growing brain tumour.
Newly diagnosed patients will receive advanced diagnostic testing, with samples of tumours taken before and after treatment with a new drug therapy. Blood samples will also be used to investigate less intrusive ways of measuring the effect of treatments.
The results will help personalise treatment, enabling doctors to use available therapies in a more targeted way.
