Primary Brain Tumor Clinical Trials & Research

VIDEO |

What is a Clinical Trial?

This video explains what clinical trials are and may help you decide if taking part in one is the right choice for you.
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Clinical trials at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center may give you access to new therapies that aren’t widely available. These research studies evaluate the safety and effectiveness of new ways to diagnose and treat primary brain tumors. They can also give your treatment team information about your current plan of care.

Because doctors from different disciplines work together closely through our collaborative Brain Tumor Center, many of our clinical trials combine different treatment approaches, such as radiation therapy and chemotherapy. These aggressive approaches show promise for improving the treatment of many types of brain tumors.

Our experts can help determine which clinical trial is right for you, including some of our newly opened clinical trials:

As a member of the North American Brain Tumor Coalition, we offer qualified patients access to several clinical trials sponsored by the National Cancer Institute.

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26 Clinical Trials found
Studies have shown that patients with newly diagnosed localized non-germinomatous germ cell tumors (NGGCT) of the brain or spinal cord whose disease responds well to chemotherapy before receiving radiation therapy are more likely to be free of the disease for a longer time than patients in whom chemotherapy is less effective.
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of cesium-131 (Cs-131) brachytherapy in patients with brain cancer that has come back after prior radiation therapy and who will be having surgery to remove it. Brachytherapy involves the placement of radioactive seeds into the brain during surgery. The seeds remain in place permanently in the area where the tumor was removed and give off cancer-killing radiation temporarily. 
The purpose of this study is to assess the safety and effectiveness of combining three drugs to treat people with an IDH-mutant glioma that came back after chemotherapy or surgery. The three medications are pembrolizumab, olaparib, and temozolomide. 
Glioblastomas that have an "unmethylated" MGMT gene are less likely to respond to the standard chemotherapy drug temozolomide. In this study, researchers are comparing three investigational treatments (abemaciclib, CC-115, and neratinib) with the standard treatment (temozolomide and radiation therapy) in patients newly diagnosed with glioblastoma.
Researchers are assessing obinutuzumab in people with primary central nervous system lymphoma (PCNSL) whose cancer responded to initial treatment. They want to see if obinutuzumab increases the time without the disease returning or getting worse. This type of treatment is called maintenance therapy.
Researchers want to see how much the drug trastuzumab deruxtecan (T-DXd) can get into brain tumors. The people in this study have glioblastoma or cancer that spread to the brain from other parts of the body. They are scheduled to have brain tumor surgery. In addition, their tumors express (make) a protein called HER2, which boosts cancer cell growth. Researchers want to know if T-DXd may be an effective treatment for brain cancers that express the HER2 protein.