Frederick National Laboratory, Duke partner to fight brain cancer

It took at least 10 years for the poliovirus PVSPIRO, first created by Dr. Matthias Gromeier, of Duke, to be ready for a clinical trial.

The idea: Use the poliovirus to help treat recurrent glioblastoma, a deadly cancer with very few effective treatments and a short survival length. People diagnosed with the grade IV malignant glioma, on average, have a survival of less than 20 months. It’s less than a year if the cancer is recurrent, meaning it returns after surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, according to a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“This is a very, very serious condition where we really have no effective treatment at this point, so we’re very excited that we had extraordinary survival in a portion of patients with our therapy,” Gromeier said.

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