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Geddy Lee has lived a big life for a little dog. As a puppy, the tiny terrier mix was abandoned in Mississippi during a high-speed car chase. Rescued by law enforcement, she found a loving home in Pennsylvania. Life was good—until last summer.

In August, Geddy Lee began having seizures, and her veterinarian referred the eight-year-old to Penn Vet for further evaluation. At Penn Vet’s Ryan Hospital, Tessa Arendt, a specialty intern in neurology, and Wojciech Panek, an assistant professor of neurology and neurosurgery in the department of clinical sciences and advanced medicine, performed a brain MRI, which revealed a right frontal lobe mass.

Sherri Horsey Darden has no family history of brain cancer, nor has she been having persistent headaches, seizures, or any other symptoms that could suggest a tumor.

But when she head the Brain Tumor Foundation, a New York-based charity, was offering free magnetic resonance (MRI) brain scans in Philadelphia, she made sure to get an appointment.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania believe they’re one step closer to finding a treatment that fights glioblastoma, the deadliest form of brain cancer.

Public figures who’ve died from the disease include Beau Biden, John McCain, Mia Love and most recently, Uche Ojeh — husband of “Today” show co-host and Philadelphia native, Sheinelle Jones.

The new treatment uses CAR T-cell therapy, which is a process that takes patients’ own T cells from their immune system and modifies them to identify specific cancer cell antigens, or markers.

New data on two studies are bolstering hopes that CAR-T therapy, which uses engineered immune T cells to fight cancer, may be able to overcome one of the most difficult to treat cancers of the brain, glioblastoma. 

The data are very early, involving only a handful of patients, and typical indicators of efficacy in clinical trials like overall survival are not yet available. It will take longer follow up and more patients in larger trials to truly determine efficacy, experts said. Still, experts added, the fact that many of them are responding to treatment and — in a couple cases — experiencing long lasting remission is remarkable.

A Gilead Sciences-backed therapy made with a patient's own white blood cells shrank tumors in 62% of patients with recurrent glioblastoma, a rare event for a fatal brain cancer with few treatment options, researchers reported on Sunday. The study, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago and published in Nature Medicine, is the latest among several efforts testing next-generation chimeric antigen receptor T-cell or CAR-T treatments, a type of immunotherapy in which patients' immune cells are engineered to recognize and kill cancer cells.

Every two days, Lynn Oxenberg leans over her bathroom sink while her husband shaves the shadow of auburn hair beginning to cover her head.

Once clean shaven, she sticks to her scalp four tan patches with electrodes designed to keep aggressive cancer cells from growing in her brain.

She stuffs the protruding wires and a two pound battery into a mini backpack, then heads to the grocery store, or library, or lunch with friends.

Financed in part by Kite Pharma, the study of a new cell therapy technique developed at Penn yielded positive early results in brain cancer patients.

A novel gene therapy pioneered at University of Pennsylvania has shown promise against the deadliest form of brain cancer, according to new studies out this week by researchers at Penn and a separate team at Harvard.

Chimeric antigen receptor T cell, CAR-T, therapy has been hailed as a cure for some types of blood cancer, but researchers have struggled to apply the technique to solid tumors, including brain cancers, which account for the vast majority of cancers.

CAR-T involves removing the body's T cells - white blood cells that lead the body's immune response - and genetically modifying them to target cancer when reinfused into the body.

For decades, a diagnosis of glioblastoma – an aggressive, hard-to-treat cancer in the brain – has been a death sentence for patients.

Only 3% to 5% of people who are diagnosed with this type of brain tumor will be alive three years later. On average, patients live about 14 months after diagnosis.

Now, an experimental therapy that reprograms a person’s own immune cells to attack these tumors is showing some exciting promise.

Two early trials published Wednesday showed promise in treating one of the deadliest types of cancer, glioblastoma. 

The aggressive brain cancer, which took the lives of John McCain and Beau Biden, is only diagnosed at stage 4, and the five-year survival rate is around 10%.