Newswise — LOS ANGELES (June 6, 2022) — Recently, Michael Wulfe, who is 61 and lives in West Hollywood, was on the phone with his sister, Stephanie Wulfe, in Dallas. They talk at least once a day, but that day, something wasn’t right. “I was talking, and then I didn’t have the words,” Wulfe said. “My sister immediately said, ‘Call Cedars-Sinai!’”
They were both afraid that the cancer Wulfe had recovered from 16 years earlier—a deadly type of brain tumor called glioblastoma—had come back.
At Cedars-Sinai the next day, Wulfe was relieved to learn his cancer wasn’t back. And his neurosurgeon, John Yu, MD, director of Surgical Neuro-Oncology and vice chair of Neurosurgical Oncology in the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai, was happy to hear that his patient was still cancer-free after 16 years, and that Yu’s decades-long quest to create a vaccine against glioblastoma remained on the right track.
Glioblastoma, the most common and most lethal type of brain tumor, can grow with alarming speed. It is the type of tumor that killed Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy, and President Joe Biden’s son, Beau.
“The median survival for someone with glioblastoma is about 14 months after diagnosis,” Yu said. “And so, almost uniformly, patients die within that time frame, or not too long thereafter.”
