A recent publication presented objective evidence that patients with and without brain metastases perform similarly in phase I clinical trials for advanced-stage cancer. This finding supports what neurosurgeons and neuro-oncologists have long suspected; namely, that the presence of brain metastases need not mandate exclusion of patients from early-phase clinical trials.
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Acknowledgements
This article was supported in part by Grant W81XWH-062-0033 from the US Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program to R. J. Weil. We wish to thank the Melvin Burkhardt Chair in Neurosurgical Oncology and the Karen Colina Wilson research endowment within the Burkhardt Brain Tumor and Neuro-Oncology Center at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation for additional support and funding.
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Marko, N., Weil, R. Patients with brain metastases in early-phase trials. Nat Rev Clin Oncol 8, 390–391 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrclinonc.2011.73
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrclinonc.2011.73
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