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Research Roundtable

NBTS’s Research Roundtable program provides a means for regular and meaningful dialogue among a broad stakeholder community, including government, academia, the life science industry, patients, and patient advocates to address complex issues and identify actionable solutions.

The Research Roundtable is a mission-driven forum aimed at addressing current scientific, clinical, and regulatory challenges.

At Research Roundtable meetings, participants tackle specific barriers to progress in the neuro-oncology field, and through robust dialogue, collaborate on action plans that will facilitate potential solutions—with the overall goal of advancing brain tumor research.

Research Roundtable Achievements

Resulting from the December 2019 Roundtable on “Progress and Evidence Requirements for Developing a New Brain Tumor Endpoint,” two scientific papers were published in the journal Neuro-Oncology in February 2021 and August 2022. Following these papers, NBTS provided a grant for a validation study to test a potential new approach to measure therapeutic response in brain tumor clinical trials that is scheduled to run through April 2025.
Resulting from the July 2020 Roundtable on “Innovating Brain Tumor Clinical Trials: Building on Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Experience,” a paper educating the neuro-oncology field on trial flexibility was published in Neuro-Oncology in April 2021. Subsequently, NBTS partnered with the lung cancer patient advocacy organization, LUNGevity, on a white paper documenting how standardized remote consent policies for clinical trials could be employed to make it easier to enroll patients with primary and metastatic brain tumors onto clinical trials.
Resulting from the July 2021 Roundtable on “Use of External Control Arms in Pediatric Brain Tumor Trials,” a paper demonstrating a pilot study is being reviewed for publication in a scientific journal, and, importantly, a new bill, supported by NBTS, has been introduced in the United States Congress to help facilitate the use of external controls for pediatric brain tumor trials.
Facilitated in part by the April 2022 Roundtable, “Update of the Response Assessment in Neuro-Oncology (RANO) Criteria & Discussion of Overall Response Rate,” the RANO Working group published an updated, unified criteria that addresses some of the limitations of RANO 1.0 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Titled, “RANO 2.0: Update to the Response Assessment in Neuro-Oncology Criteria for High- and Low-Grade Gliomas in Adults,” this critical paper provides trial sponsors standardized and reliable criteria to measure clinical response and predict efficacy of novel brain tumor therapies.