The Dana Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) seeks to participate as a Full Member Institution of The North American Brain Tumor Consortium (NABTC), providing patient resources and novel therapeutic agents for phase I/II trials in brain tumor patients. The Central Operations Office/Coordinating Center for the NABTC will be located at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) under the Group Leadership of Michael Prados, MD. The University of Texas, San Antonio will serve as the Pharmacokinetics Center. The goal of NABTC is to conduct novel clinical trials in brain tumor patients and to perform ancillary laboratory investigations of aspects of CNS tumor biology with potential clinical implications. In this renewal application, the NABTC will also plan to interact with the other funded adult (NABTT) and pediatric (PBTC) brain tumor consortia, the Mouse Models of Cancer Consortium, the recently funded Brain Tumor SPORE institutions (UCSF and University of Alabama), and the intramural Neuro-Oncology Branch at the NIH/NCI. The multidisciplinary Neuro-Oncology program at DFCI is committed to 1) Ensuring that a minimum of 20 evaluable patients will be accrued into NABTC trails each year; 2) Acting as a resource to the consortium in areas where we have particular expertise; for example in performing correlative studies evaluating genotype of tumors and in vivo evidence of inhibition of specific signal transduction pathways, array comparative genomic hybridization (CGH), transgenic animal models of gliomas, brain tumor tissue bank and immunotherapies; 3) Proposing novel therapies for NABTC trials. In this regard, we have proposed i) Phase I/II study of RAD001 for recurrent malignant gliomas; and ii) Phase I/II trial of RAD001 with radiation therapy for newly-diagnosed glioblastomas. In addition, we hope to conduct a phase II study of a telomerase vaccine and a phase I/II trial of an inhibitor of CXCR4 with NABTC. In summary, we will bring the full resources of the multidisciplinary Adult Neuro-Oncology Program at DFCI, and the resources of a Comprehensive Cancer Center to enhance the mission of NABTC in developing more effective therapies for patients with brain tumors.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 22 publications
