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The French company CarThera has teamed up with the US firm Kiyatec to study the effects on individual patients of an ultrasound therapy to deliver brain cancer drugs to the brain.
Under the agreement, Kiyatec will test the effects of chemotherapy on cells taken from CarThera’s ongoing phase I/II trial in patients with brain cancer. The goal is to predict how well each patient will respond to the chemotherapy. The collaboration will help the partners to improve patient survival by selecting the best chemotherapy drugs for patients and improving the drugs’ delivery to brain tumors.
Carthera is developing an ultrasound-emitting implant that opens up the blood-brain barrier and allows chemotherapy drugs to enter the brain and treat the brain cancer glioblastoma. Glioblastoma patients currently survive for an average of only 15 months after diagnosis, and the cancer often recurs after chemotherapy.
“Relevant clinical advances that improve outcomes for patients with glioblastoma have been few and far between over the last two decades,” stated Frederic Sottilini, CEO of CarThera.
CarThera’s ultrasound implant has proven to improve the effects of the chemotherapy drug carboplatin in a small phase I/IIa trial, extending the survival of patients with recurrent glioblastoma by four months. CarThera’s current trial is using an updated version of the implant designed to make a larger region of the blood-brain barrier let chemotherapy drugs through. The trial is expected to be completed by July 2020.
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