GOOD NEWS ABOUT BRAIN CANCER

An experimental new treatment makes tumors melt away

- BY Christopher Cox FROM NEW YORK MAGAZINE

One morning in April 2023, Marcela Maus, a cancer researcher at Mass General Research Institute in Boston, got a call from her colleague Bryan Choi.

“He called me, and he’s like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!’ And I’m like, ‘What is going on?’” Dr. Maus says. Dr. Choi, a neurosurgeon with the languid demeanor of a surfer, was not given to outbursts. Dr. Maus hurried over to his office.

The day before, Drs. Choi and Maus had treated their first patient in a clinical trial for an aggressive brain cancer called glioblastoma, infusing genetically modified white blood cells directly into the fluid surrounding his brain. They had been up all night worrying, especially after the patient, a 74-year-old man, developed a fever. Dr. Choi had ordered an MRI.

When Dr. Maus got to Dr. Choi’s office, images from the MRI were loading on his screen. They stared in wonder: The patient’s tumor, which a few days before had shown up on the scan as a bright blob the size of a strawberry, had almost entirely disappeared.

“My first instinct was that there was something wrong with the MRI scanner,” Dr. Choi says. But the followup scans looked even better.

Several weeks later, they treated a second patient, a civil engineer from upstate New York named Tom Fraser, and, to their astonishment, the process repeated itself: the infusion, the fever, and the rapid regression of the tumor.

“It was almost like clockwork,” Dr. Maus says. After a third patient had a similar response, she paused the trial and wrote up the results.

Glioblastoma is the most common type of malignant brain cancer in adults. It can strike at any age, and it's nearly uniformly fatal. Patients are often diagnosed in the emergency room after the tumor causes some somatic catastrophe, such as seizure, sudden loss of speech, or an inability to control limbs. The median time from diagnosis to death is just over a year.