Male2:… the astrocytomas.
Male1: Which is?
Male2: Astrocytomas are tumors that can occur anywhere in the brain. They are tumors of what are called astrocytes that are supporting cells in the brain and they occur in the front of the brain, where patients where you think in the cerebellar area where we can see them looking like megaloblastomas.
Male1: Can it be cured?
Male2: Astrocytomas, many of them can be cured. Some of them cannot. They come in two varieties. One is called low grade astrocytomas and low grade astrocytomas can almost always be cured, but not a 100%, but getting up there. Most of them requires surgery alone and they can be resected completely or almost completely. They can be cured and children do not need other therapy. The high grade astrocytomas are much more aggressive tumors and these tumors are challenging to cure. They require resection by the neurosurgeon. Most of the time, they are in locations where they can be completely resected but not always. They require radiation and we are trying to find chemotherapy that is optimally effective in these tumors, so unfortunately, with high grade astrocytomas, cure rates now are only in the mid 30s to maybe below 40% ranges as opposed to what we are looking at in the 95% range.
Male1: Do we need chemotherapy or anything else sometimes?
Male2: We usually give—we do give them chemotherapy that is the standard. The difference that chemotherapy makes right now is a little but not great and what we are looking at doing is using different approaches to treating this. So we have a protocol that is about to open that looks at a type of medication that does not kill cells in the way that regular chemotherapy does, but attaches to a specific protein on these astrocytoma cells and decreases the rate of growth by doing that and that with traditional chemotherapy, we are hoping to see an improved cure rate.
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