Preamble and introduction Please note: this blog post might be a ‘bit of a ride’.  It was born from self-work I’m doing to adjust how I capture my daily experiences and work with them to build more reliable memories in the post-craniotomy version of my brain.  This work led me to explore related topics through published journals, in podcasts, and other material I’ve found along the way.  You can read on as I make what I think are reasonable connections between evolution and natural selection, brain function and how we experience our surroundings, memory and its fallibility, and how I believe adjusting my own strategies for learning and remembering as I live post-craniotomy with brain cancer has left me with some insight that might help others.  If this sounds interesting, keep reading!  I’ll reference sources for many of the claims within, and you can infer that non-referenced claims imply that they’re based on my understanding and connection of what I’ve expe...

 In January, 2024, and after thinking more about therapeutic advances with the potential to target mutated Isocitrate Dehydrogenase present in some brain cancers, I emailed a diverse group of experts with some thoughts on a potential future non-invasive diagnostic test that might help confirm the presence of IDH mutations.  I contacted people unknown to me, but whose names I had found on a variety of published material, in hopes that they might share it with others who could determine whether there might be future value here.  Now, I'm posting it to this blog in hopes that others with associated interest might one day find it and be able to assess the ideas viability.  Below, I share what I sent as a lengthy and unsolicited email. Sent on Monday, January 15, 2024: I write today with a hope of reaching experts who might validate or refute a future model I envision for a non-invasive and potentially simple diagnostic test to detect the presence of IDH mutations associa...

I wrote  in an earlier post  about advancements in targeting mutations in Isocitrate Dehydrogenase (IDH) as a potential therapeutic approach.  On February 20, 2024, Servier confirmed in a twitter post the filing of their New Drug Application (NDA) with the FDA.   The 'Newsroom' post on the Servier US website (at  servier.us/blog/fda-and-ema-accept-vorasidenib-regulatory-submissions... ) further confirms the 'clock start date' under a priority review that accompanies a breakthrough therapy designation, meaning that the FDA and Servier commit to a six month review and final decision / action on the NDA by August 20, 2024. By filing under the Project Orbis framework established by the FDA's Oncology Center of Excellence, this allows for concurrent and collaborative review across the US FDA, Australia's TGA, Brazil's ANVISA, Canada's Health Canada, Israel's Ministry of Health, Singapore's Health Sciences Authority, Switzerland's Swissmedic, Unit...

In my university years in the 1990s studying Biochemistry and later post-graduate education in Pharmaceutical R&D, I learned about proteins and enzymes, and possible approaches to discover and develop medicines that target the specific proteins and enzymes linked to diseases or metabolic dysfunction as a means of therapy and perhaps cure.  I learned how it was possible to screen thousands of possible chemical structures to find something that might block an enzyme by binding to it or interfering with it, and that over the course of decades an initial protein or enzyme of interest could start us down a path to identify a useful molecule and then develop it into a medicine that could be tested for safety and efficacy and later used to treat individuals and provide hope for a better quality of life. I have reviewed my textbooks and find extraordinarily little in the way of functional or causal understanding of brain cancers.   It took until 2010 and later before researchers...

My surgery took place on Tuesday November 1 st , 2022, at St. Michael's hospital in Toronto.   The roughly 12-hour procedure went smoothly and still feels pretty incredible given the timeline from a January discussion with my doctor about what I thought were panic attacks, to an October 13 th MRI with radiology report on October 19 th , consultation with one of Canada's leading Neurosurgeons on October 27 th , then wheeling into an Operating Room just days later, with a team of six exceptional doctors whose names I know and some others who made it the success it was. Image 2:  Before and after surgery The MRI images before and after the surgery show a near complete resection.   For those unfamiliar with viewing images like these, they’re reversed left-to-right in the same way that in a photograph of two people, the person on the left side of the photo is standing on the right side of the person next to them, from their perspective.   The pathology report documents f...

 In 2020, the whole world adjusted to respond to the newly emerging SARS-CoV-2 virus we would soon know as COVID-19, for the disease it causes.  I began working remotely in March 2020 and by around July I started noticing short moments where I felt ‘disjointed’ but couldn’t quite explain.  I started tracking these sensations by noting when they occurred, the intensity on a scale of 1 to 10, and with a short note about what I was doing at the time and what the sensation felt like.  They were rare at first, but by November 2020 I experienced them at least weekly.  I tracked with more focus and initially felt they lined up well with symptoms of panic attack that many were talking about as we adjusted to the ‘new normal’ in a COVID world.  I focused more on meditation and breathing techniques, adding mindfulness practices and body scans to my days. By around October or November 2021, what I was now calling “events” were happening several times every day, someti...