Radiolab[0] had an episode a while back where they talked about Henry Heimlich, inventor of the Heimlich Maneuver. During it they mention that Henry advocated for Malariotherapy[1], infecting patient with Malaria to cure diseases like AIDS/HIV.
It's highly controversial, but I thought it warranted being brought up because it parallels this story.
This is an inspiring story. But "The full article is published in the May 5, 2014 issue of People magazine, and is available by subscription or for purchase at the People magazine website" doesn't inspire confidence in the treatment method, as that is not how clinical medical findings are peer-reviewed. The submission kindly made here is a press release from a medical school press office.
As I search the doctor's name on Google Scholar, I see that he has had various journal publications on various aspects of investigating or treating brain disease for a long time. His research into using polio viruses as agents for treating tumors has attracted some notice in published books, but this is not yet a mainstream treatment. It will be interesting to see if a larger number of patients, seen by doctors other than Matthias Gromeier, also benefit consistently from this kind of treatment, which is now experimental and ethical to use in human subjects only in the most desperate cases.
Of course the human work will be peer-reviewed, but the study is in the early stages and still ongoing. They have an IND (investigational drug) protocol approved by the FDA to conduct the trial, and the trial is overseen by panels at both the institutional and federal level.
The point of pieces like this is essentially to attract patients to the trial (both directly and by making referral providers aware) so that the science can be validated. Perhaps surprisingly, there are a large number of active trials in the country and relatively limited numbers of patients who meet inclusion criteria. So to some degree the big centers have to compete for enrollment. (secondarily, they hope to attract donors for future work in this and other areas; this kind of risky pilot work is heavily seeded by institutional money, before NIH will get involved)
"PVS-RIPO, the prototype oncolytic poliovirus recombinant, was FDA approved under an Investigator-initiated Investigational New Drug application (IND no. 14,735). Clinical trials in patients with glioblastoma multiforme are currently recruiting patients (clinicaltrials.gov trial no. NCT01491893)."
Friend of mine had Stage-IV melanoma and was told to write his will. He had an experimental treatment where they gave him tuberculosis. The tuberculosis "killed" the melanoma and then they treated the tuberculosis. He died ten years later from a heart attack.
I understand this treatment has been discredited. Nice to see that someone is pursuing this avenue again.
My Dad died from metastatic stage-IV melanoma. The gene therapies (which were extremely expensive) weren't effective beyond adding maybe an extra 6-8 weeks.
I'm interested if the tuberculosis actually "killed" the melanoma or if it caused an unusually aggressive autoimmune response that happened to knock out the melanoma. I'd like to see if there's a case study available on that treatment method.
I'm a patient at Duke's Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center and have heard a lot about this.
I have Stage 3 Anaplastic Astrocytoma, had a very successful resection, radiation -- both at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell, and am now undergoing a long tail of Chemotherapy. It is nice to have the minds at Duke in my 'back pocket' looking into all of this.
It's unfortunate that Brain Cancer treatments do not get as easily funded as experiments for the much more common, even though what they want to do is essentially the same -- eventually cure all.
This was done to a friend-of-a-friend of mine. When he was diagnosed he was given 90 days. He lived 2 years so it was a win in my opinion. I believe he thought so too.
Unfortunately, that doesn't really mean anything. Glioblastomas, like many types of cancer, come in several different forms often depending on the specific mutations that led to the cancer. The different forms have greatly different behavior, and cause death on different time scales (e.g. there are 60-day forms and 5-year forms, and we can't yet distinguish them in a clinical setting without watching them progress). Some of this uncertainty will soon be eliminated by the widespread genetic sequencing of tumors.
It's highly controversial, but I thought it warranted being brought up because it parallels this story.
[0]: http://www.radiolab.org/story/heimlichs-maneuver/
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malariotherapy