Richard Scolyer

And there's significant risks associated with them, but knowing how to pick them up early and manage them appropriately is definitely a good thing to have.

There's side effects from having brain surgery and radiotherapy.

I had skin rash, lots of seizures.

I think I've probably gone unconscious maybe four or five times, what's called partial seizures.

And as I understand it,

when you're on anti-epileptic drugs, then you tend not to have the grand mal seizures where your whole body shakes.

They're partial seizures.

And, yeah, sometimes I was getting, well, maybe up to 20 of those a day.

But they wouldn't... I didn't find it particularly debilitating.

I definitely felt tired and, you know, on a whole host of anti-epileptic medications to keep them under control.

And they're basically doing that now, so...

The great advantage that we have when we do pre-surgery treatment is that you get a biopsy of the tumor before the treatment and a biopsy afterwards, after the immunotherapy, and we can compare the two and get a sense of whether the immune system's been activated.

And that's the really important science that's been generated from

from me going down this pre-surgery treatment and that gives more evidence that this is something that needs to be formally explored in a clinical trial.

So I had a biopsy initially to make the diagnosis of glioblastoma.

Then I was given immunotherapy through different types of drugs.

And then 16 days between the two, I had a second operation which debulked as much as possible.

And we compared those two tumour samples to look for differences.

And this is our bread and butter expertise.

There was a marked increase in the number and type of inflammatory cells or lymphocytes in particular that the immunotherapy stimulates to try and attack the tumour.