This article I’m pasting below came into my inbox today from a newsletter that I receive from the National Brain Tumor Society. Temodar is the chemotherapy that I am currently taking. It’s quite disturbing for me to read things like this, but it makes me even more confident that pursuing multiple ways to kill this tumor is a good idea. Check it out.

THURSDAY, March 5 (HealthDay News) — Temozolomide (Temodar), a standard treatment for brain cancer, may boost the aggressiveness of surviving cancer cells, making tumor recurrence more likely, a new study suggests.The research team, from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, have identified cells in brain tumors called gliomas that have stem cell-like qualities and are able to survive chemotherapy with the help of a particular protein. These surviving cells become drug-resistant, and may be the reason treatment for brain cancer is usually unsuccessful.

The researchers isolated cells from mice and human cancer brain tumors called glioblastomas. Some of these cells appeared to have the ability to renew themselves and resist chemotherapy, the team found, and ABCG2 appears to be a marker for these resistant cells.

Holland’s group also identified how the protein helps tumor cells expel chemotherapy drugs.

“Current treatment for gliomas works for a while and then usually fails,” Holland said. “These findings might be partly the reason for that. There is more than one cell type in these tumors, and they respond differently to the therapy we treat people with.”

For example, the chemotherapy drug temozolomide — which is the standard treatment for gliomas — actually increased the number of drug-resistant cells. Because temozolomide doesn’t target ABCG2, it may render surviving cells more resistant to treatments that do target the ABCG2 protein, Holland theorized.

“Life is complicated; brain tumors are complicated, too,” he said.

Dr. Ronald Benveniste is an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Miami School of Medicine. He believes the study has a real upside because it points to new, longer-lasting brain cancer treatments.

“Clinically, what we see with patients with glioblastoma is that after surgery, radiation and chemotherapy with temozolomide, they live longer and a subset of them will actually live a year, two years or even longer. And then pretty much 100% of the patients relapse and no one knows why,” Benveniste said.

This study identifies the mechanism by which this happens, he said. “When you treat mice with temozolomide they develop recurrent diseases even quicker, so temozolomide make the cells that survive act in a more aggressive manner,” Benveniste said.