This blog features posts from multiple departments of the National Brain Tumor Society. From keeping you updated on the research advancements, to providing insight into our public policy advocacy efforts, we want to keep you informed of how NBTS as an organization is here for you. Questions or comments? Email questions@braintumor.org.
National Brain Tumor Society Summit—Kicking Research into Overdrive
The National Brain Tumor Society (NBTS) has kicked its pursuit of new treatments for brain cancer into “overdrive,” according to Rabbi Eric B. Wisnia, of the Congregation Beth Chaim in Princeton, New Jersey and emcee at NBTS’s Annual Meeting tonight. “I am convinced that together we will find a cure.”
Much of the buzz at the meeting was around the Mary Catherine Calisto Systems Biology Initiative as the grant recipients were announced. Six of the nation’s leading brain tumor researchers received the Initiative’s first round of grants to develop a specific plan for research aimed at developing new treatments for brain tumors [glioblastomas].
Although it might sound like the name of a college course, systems biology is actually a promising new approach to research that NBTS and many other major health organizations believe is needed to speed the development of new, more effective treatments for brain tumors.
Today, we are truly living in an “unprecedented time," said speaker Wai-Kwan Alfred Yung, MD, Chairman and Professor of Neurology and the Margaret & Ben Love Chair in Clinical Cancer in the Department of Neuro-Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. We have data and "a level of insight [about brain cancer] that we could have only dreamed of 10 or 20 years ago."
NBTS is “truly visionary“ in its aggressive pursuit of a cure for brain cancer, Dr. Yung added. “We are embarking today on a serious multi-year engagement that will bring together the very best of academia, research, and industry with one and only one mission – to find a cure first for high-grade gliomas, then other brain cancers. We will need to break the current research funding paradigm. We will need to break the usual barriers between institutions and industries.”
Dr. Yung, who was recently appointed to Chair of the new NBTS Strategic Advisory Committee and who is a 13-year survivor of bladder cancer, closed on a passionate note:
Together, “we have one and only one mission: to find a cure to glioblastoma and other cancers. I want to eliminate cancer from this earth.”
Next up: scientists fill us in on systems biology at tomorrow morning’s scientific symposium. Rise and shine….
