Prof. Richard Scolyer is an Australian pathologist who’s bravely sharing his GBM journey on Twitter. Looks like he’s getting excellent truly personalized care — #1 on our Glioblastoma Bill of Rights.

Our founder Jessica Morris would’ve loved “think big and be courageous.”

From Radio New Zealand:

“Ordinarily, the treatment after being diagnosed with brain cancer would be to have surgery to excise the tumour as soon as possible, before embarking on courses of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, he said.

But the pioneering work on pre-surgery immunotherapy treatments he and his colleague professor Georgina Long had undertaken at Melanoma Institute Australia made Scolyer want to try a different approach.

“We know from our work in melanoma that if you give immunotherapy, which are drugs that activate the immune system to recognise the tumour, they work better if you give them whilst the tumour’s on board, because there’s more tumour there for the immune system to be activated against.”

Fifteen years ago, he said, the prognosis for people with advanced stage melanoma was “dismal”, with fewer than 5 percent of patients still alive five years later, but “because of discoveries that we’ve led at Melanoma Institute Australia … the prognosis has changed, so more than 55 percent of people are alive five years later”.

Attempting to treat brain cancer by delivering immunotherapy to a patient before their tumour was taken out had never been tried before, Scolyer said, but based on the results they had seen in their melanoma research, it seemed to him and Long like “the right thing to do”.”