Brain Cancer Research

 Brain tumors are not rare, but research is badly underfunded. Over 210,000 Americans are diagnosed with them every year.  Over 70,000 are primary brain tumors and the rest are metastatic brain cancer that has spread from cancer elsewhere in the body.  However, there is little awareness of the scope and severity of brain tumors. The amount of money going to brain tumor research is very small compared to other forms of cancer.

As it stands today, the ‘largest’ brain cancer foundation is National Brain Tumor Society which generates ~$9M per year, with roughly $2M going to research.  Compare that with the over $400M that Komen raises for breast cancer or the $40M raised by the Prostate Cancer Foundation.  The other brain cancer foundations are much smaller and invest even less in research.  So, there isn’t much funding available for the kinds of research that are sorely needed.

What little funding there is goes to research on Glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive brain tumor.  The results of research to date on GBM have not yielded any meaningful new FDA approved drugs, but at least there has been effort. The sad truth is that almost nothing has been tried against Oligo in the past 20 years.