National Brain Tumor Society, Yale Collaborate to
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The National Brain Tumor Society and Yale University have partnered to conduct research on response mechanisms for DNA damage in an attempt to find new treatments for brain tumor patients. The National Brain Tumor Society is the biggest not-for-profit organization focused on brain cancer in the United States.
The initiative, called the DNA Damage Response Consortium, will be led by Professor Ranjit Bindra of the School of Medicine at Yale University. Bindra is the scientific director of the Chênevert Brain Tumor Center, in addition to being a professor of therapeutic radiology.
In an interview, Bindra explained that the damage response was used to mend broken DNA in the body’s cells, noting that in brain tumor cells, the damage response network was dysregulated. Failures or inconsistencies in the mechanisms for damage response cause cancerous tumors such as brain tumors to form.
The society and Bindra hope to further studies on DNA damage response to help advance treatments for cancerous or malignant tumors. Treatments for damage response can be applied to almost all brain tumor types given evidence that shows success in the treatment of drug-resistant cancers such as ovarian cancer. Damage response treatments can also be used together with other treatments, which make them beneficial.
At the moment, only a handful of drugs are approved for damage response treatment. However, none of them was developed to specifically target brain cancer.
The consortium’s objective is to collaborate with different researchers to develop therapies that weaken cancer cell DNA damage response. The researchers believe that weakening or blocking this damage response will make these cells more susceptible to other treatment forms for cancer that reduce tumor malignancy and cause damage.
The society’s chief scientific officer, Kirk Tanner, explained that the consortium would also test different drugs against lab models and evaluate the promising drugs in clinical trials, with the objective of advancing them for review, approval and marketing as new therapies for brain tumors in the future. Tanner noted that rapid drug qualifications and clinical trials afforded patients more treatment opportunities.
The initiative will also make use of collaborations between researchers at New York University, St. Jude’s Cancer Hospital, Mayo Clinic and the University of California San Francisco, among other institutions for its research.
The society’s CEO, David Arons, noted that the National Brain Tumor Society believed that the potential combinations and drugs discovered and advanced under the initiative had the potential to revolutionize the brain tumor treatment landscape. This future may not be far off given the advanced work that biotech companies such as CNS Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CNSP) are doing on their own to discover novel remedies for brain cancers.
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