North Central Cancer Treatment Group

Abnormal Protein Indicates Poorer Prognosis for Patients with Rapidly Growing, Malignant Brain Tumors

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Patients who have brain tumors that contain an abnormal protein, called EGFRvIII, respond poorly to standard treatments and should be offered the choice of experimental therapies sooner, according to a study led by Mayo Clinic and the North Central Cancer Treatment Group (NCCTG).

Jan Buckner, M.D., will report the findings at the 40th annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), June 7, in New Orleans. Dr. Buckner is a neuro-oncologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and chair of NCCTG, a network of more than 400 community-based cancer treatment clinics in the United States and Canada that work with Mayo Clinic to conduct clinical studies for advancing cancer treatment.

The study advances medical understanding of brain tumors. Among the 168 patients studied, 63 had grade 3 gliomas, moderately aggressive and sometimes curable brain tumors. The other 105 patients had grade 4 glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a highly aggressive, incurable brain tumor that is known to frequently contain the abnormal EGFRvIII protein. All of the patients had received the same radiation and chemotherapy treatments.

Researchers compared the outcomes with and without the abnormal EGFR vIII protein. They found that patients with the grade 3 gliomas who also had the abnormal protein had significantly poorer outcomes.

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“These patients lived an average of 7.2 months compared to an average survival of 33 months for patients with the same type of tumor but without the EGFRvIII protein,” says

Dr. Buckner. “As with GBM patients, the radiation and chemotherapy treatments had considerably less benefit on patients with grade 3 gliomas and the EGFRvIII protein.”

According to Dr. Buckner, “This finding means EGFRvIII can serve to identify patients with a rapidly fatal tumor. These patients can be given the choice sooner of trying experimental therapies, which aim to counteract the effects of the abnormal protein and thereby potentially improve the patient’s chances for longer survival.”

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DISCLOSURE: In addition to Mayo Clinic and NCCTG, researchers with Toledo Community CCOP in Toledo, Ohio; MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas; and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md., were involved in conducting this study. The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute.

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