Éssen, Germany

REACH: RWE Retrospective Study to Evaluate Cenobamate Impact on Health Care Resource Utilization

A Phase 3, Placebo-Controlled Study to Investigate LP352 in Children and Adults With Dravet Syndrome (DS)

A Study to Investigate LP352 in Children and Adults With Developmental and Epileptic Encephalopathies (DEE)

Capivasertib Plus Fulvestrant vs. Fulvestrant in Primary High-risk Lobular Breast Cancer

The evaluation of CCCA in the HR+/HER2- invasive lobular breast cancer patient population allows assessment of treatment efficacy with an achievable sample size of HR+/HER2- breast cancer patients within an acceptable and scientifically meaningful duration of recruitment. CCCA can be assessed immediately after last patients end of treatment. Central blinded pathological assessment of CCCA is planned in this study as a standardized preparation of the sampled tissue by the central pathologist. This pathologist is blinded regarding the study therapy administered, i. e. with or without capivasertib. The addition of capivasertib to fulvestrant in many clinical trials correlates with an improvement in PFS compared to fulvestrant alone in patients with HR+/HER2- locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer. This effect was observed regardless of a PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway activation. None of the ongoing studies investigate the effects of the combined treatment in invasive lobular breast cancer. Given that these tumors are less likely to respond to chemotherapy, identification of patients that can be spared from chemotherapy is desirable. On the other hand, it is important to identify patients with invasive lobular breast cancer not responding to neoadjuvant ET who might be at increased risk for recurrence, who would therefore potentially benefit from further adjuvant therapies including chemotherapy. Given the high rates of PI3K pathway alterations in such tumors, it is expected that the CCCA rate could be increased by adding capivasertib to fulvestrant. GBG expect that the potential benefit of improved CCCA rate with a combination treatment compared to fulvestrant monotherapy would outweigh the potential risks due to added toxicity, which has already been shown in clinical trials to be well tolerated by patients.

The LYMPH Trial - Microsurgical Versus Conservative Treatment of Chronic Breast Cancer Associated Lymphedema

To date, conservative complex physical decongestion therapy (CDT) is the gold standard for BCRL (breast cancer related lymphedema) and includes manual lymphatic drainage, local compression with bandages and garments, physical exercises and meticulous skin care. It is, however, too often ineffective to prevent stage progression in curing BCRL and purely symptomatic. Lymphovenous anastomosis (LVA) and vascularized lymph node transfer (VLNT) are two surgical techniques that, in contrast to CDT, are able to actually address the underlying causes and eventually restore the lymphatic drainage. LVA achieves this by creating numerous bypasses between lymphatic vessels and venules allowing the drainage of excessive fluid within the subcutaneous tissues into the venous system, while VLNT usually brings functioning lymph nodes to an area devoid of lymph nodes or with dysfunctional lymph nodes, thus enabling the spontaneous development of new lymphatic pathways. Both techniques have shown very promising results with low complication rates and improved Quality of Life (QoL) for the patients. However, no multicentric randomized controlled trial (RCT) has yet prospectively evaluated the superiority of these surgical techniques over CDT alone, limiting patient's access to most effective treatment available. Requests for cost reimbursement must still be submitted to insurance companies in most countries and are often rejected, thus delaying surgical treatment and resulting in prolonged suffering of affected patients. This is untenable seeing as affected patients suffer from a heavy physical, psychological and financial burden. This pragmatic, randomized, multicenter trial aims to establish a solid scientific basis assessing the superiority of surgical treatment over CDT alone.

RCT to Evaluate STERN FIX Device As a Sternal Stabilization System in Patients After Sternotomy

A Study to Assess Disease Activity in Adolescent and Adult Participants With Atopic Dermatitis Who Receive Oral Upadacitinib Tablets in a Real-World Setting

HRS-AKI Treatment With TIPS in Patients With Cirrhosis

Cirrhosis is a major cause of global health burden worldwide. Acute kidney injury (AKI) occurs in 20% of hospitalized patients with cirrhosis. Acute kidney injury is a relatively new definition of renal failure which takes into account the dynamic changes in serum creatinine. Among the causes of AKI, hepatorenal syndrome-AKI has the worst prognosis. HRS-AKI is an acute condition which occurs in patients with ascites, mainly refractory ascites. HRS-AKI includes the traditional hepatorenal syndrome type 1, which was defined by a serum creatinine cutoff and which has an ominous prognosis when left untreated, nevertheless HRS-AKI also includes milder forms of renal failure. The standard treatment of HRS-AKI is with the infusion of albumin and terlipressin. Although this treatment improves renal function, patients remain at risk for new episodes of HRS-AKI and liver transplantation should be considered. Nevertheless, this optimal solution is only a reality for a privileged few given the shortage of organs and the common presence of contraindications. Development of HRS-AKI is caused by increased pressure in the portal vein (the vein which brings the blood from the intestines to the liver), among other factors. Increased pressure in the portal vein, also called portal hypertension, is one of the main pathophysiological mechanisms that lead to the different complications of cirrhosis. Transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) is an interventional radiological procedure which reduces the pressure in the portal vein by creating a short-cut between the portal vein and the hepatic vein, the vein which brings the blood from the liver towards the heart. TIPS placement has become the mainstay of treatment of some complications of cirrhosis, namely variceal bleeding and refractory ascites. Although rationally plausible, the use of TIPS in HRS-AKI has not been evaluated in the context of randomized controlled trials. Indirect data suggest that it could be helpful, since patients who become TIPS have an improvement in renal hemodynamics and renal function as well as less episodes of HRS-AKI in the follow-up. On the other hand, traditional HRS type 1 can be associated to liver failure and cardiac alterations which contraindicate TIPS placement. HRS-AKI includes not only traditional HRS type 1, but also milder forms of the disease, so that it is reasonable to consider that TIPS placement may have a role in this condition. This study is a multicenter (14 centers), prospective, randomized controlled trial which evaluates use of TIPS in patients with HRS-AKI (stage 1, 2 and 3) versus standard of care (albumin and terlipressin). Patients with cirrhosis and HRS-AKI who fulfill the inclusion criteria and do not have any exclusion criteria will be randomized to standard of care or standard of care and TIPS. Patients will be followed for a minimum of 12 months until the end of the trial. The main end-point is to compare the survival at the end of follow-up among the two groups.

Treatment of Steroid-Refractory Acute Graft-versus-host Disease with Mesenchymal Stromal Cells Versus Best Available Therapy

Data-Driven Characterization of Neuronal Markers During Deep Brain Stimulation for Patients With Parkinson's Disease

Deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN DBS) has developed into a standard therapy for treating refractory stages of Parkinson's disease (PD). The large number of DBS systems nowadays routinely implanted represent open loop technology. These so-called continuous DBS (cDBS) systems are relatively simple from a technical perspective, as they deliver uninterrupted high-frequency stimulation pulse trains typically 24 hours a day. The stimulation is applied to the target area, like the STN, without taking into account the current level of PD symptoms or the motor state of the patient. Changes to the stimulation parameters -like pulse width, amplitude or frequency- can be applied only by a trained expert during a so-called adjustment session, which usually takes place in the clinic. This limits the number of adjustment sessions to at most a few per year. This may be sufficient to adapt the system to long-term changes of a patient's state as induced by PD progress, which take place over months and years, but certainly is not sufficient to react upon varying daily conditions or changes on even smaller temporal scales. Despite being a widely accepted approach, cDBS is known to cause several side effects such as speech impairment or tolerance to treatment due to chronic continuous stimulation, and has disadvantages with regard to energy efficiency and battery life of the implanted stimulation device. In contrast to the available cDBS systems, it would be desirable to have adaptive DBS (aDBS) systems, that provide stimulation on demand only and, for example, reduce or stop stimulation delivery during periods of inactivity or when the motor performance of the patient is sufficiently high. Even though a few aDBS prototypes have been reported in literature, they are investigated in research contexts only and have not yet been included into clinical routines. To realize the closed loop control of a patient's motor symptoms by an aDBS approach, at least one information source describing the motor state of the patient is required. On the one hand, this information may be accessible via external sensors or wearables, which record e.g. muscle tone, tremor, kinematic information etc. in every-day situations or during the execution of specific motor tasks. Alternatively, the information may also be expressed by specific brain signals, so-called neural markers, which correlate with the motor state and can act as its surrogate. Informative neural markers can be extracted from several brain areas and with different recording technologies. Activity in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and other basal ganglia can be measured both during and after the implantation of the DBS electrodes in the form of local field potentials (LFP) or microelectrode recordings (MER). Signals recorded either during stimulation, from small time windows between stimulation sequences, or with stimulation absent can provide information about the clinically relevant motor state of PD patients. Additionally, it has been shown that neural signal recordings via magneto- or electroencephalogram (MEG/EEG) and electrocorticogram (ECoG) may provide valuable complementary information compared to the signals obtained from basal ganglia. On a clinical level, the motor state of the patients can be assessed using part III of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS-III) test battery. Its assessment, however, is rather time consuming and requires the involvement of a clinician (neurologist) and consequently the full UPDRS-III score cannot be used for a aDBS implementation. Unfortunately, with the current state of research, the information about the motor behavior cannot simply be replaced by information collected via brain signals. The reasons is, that the relation between relevant neural markers of the LFP and MER recordings, and the individual motor symptoms (e.g. as described by the UPDRS-III) is far from complete and requires further investigation. To characterize candidates of neural markers, which can be utilized as surrogates for the motor state, it is important to investigate two questions: (1) (How) does the marker change upon applying DBS? (2) Is this change related to the clinical effects of DBS observed e.g. a change in the UPDRS-III score? In this context, selected oscillatory components have been described. The power of LFP oscillatory components in the beta range (12-30 Hz) has been reported to drop upon DBS and, despite unclear causal relation and action mechanisms, it has also been correlated to motor parkinsonian symptoms as bradykinesia and rigor. Furthermore, the interaction of band power of other frequency components with specific PD motor symptoms has been described. An example is the relation between the delta and gamma band power recorded from the STN with dyskinetic symptoms and the correlation of high gamma band power with UPDRS-III scores, and the modulation of high gamma through DBS or L-Dopa. Additionally, DBS stimulation has also been observed to influence cross-frequency coupling between cortical-cortical, cortical-subcortical and subcortical-subcortical structures. Most studies on the effect of DBS on the motor system and on informative neural markers report on global effects observed in group studies. However, grand average findings may not provide sufficient information to control aDBS systems for an individual patient. This is underlined by many recent studies from the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCI), where informative neural signatures have been found to be subject-specific, and where subject-specific methods for extracting informative neural markers have been applied successfully. Hence we propose to refine the level of data analysis beyond the level of group statistics. Apart from neural markers being subject-specific, the implicit dynamics of both, the neural markers and the DBS effects, should be considered: - Dynamics of the neural markers Even within an individual user and a single day, the adaptation of DBS parameters may be required in order to compensate non-stationary characteristics displayed by neural markers on several temporal scales : (a) On the scale of hours to minutes, due to, e.g., changes in wakefulness/tiredness or circadian cycle. (b) On the scale of minutes to seconds, variations e.g. in the attention level, workload. (c) On even smaller time scales due to the current status of the motor system (task preparation vs. task onset vs. sustained ongoing tasks, high force vs. precision tasks, isometric vs. movement tasks etc.). It must be expected, that the individually informative neural markers, which can be exploited to realize the closed-loop aDBS system, are subject to change their informative content in the above-mentioned time scales and scenarios. - Dynamics of the DBS effects Depending on the DBS parameters (e.g. intensity, frequency, duration, pulse shape) of the stimulation pattern applied in the immediate past, the effects onto (1) the motor system and onto (2) the informative neural markers are known to persist from several seconds to minutes even after stimulation has been turned off [Bronte-Stewart et al. 2009]. Due to this washout effect of DBS, the stimulation strategy of an aDBS system will probably benefit from taking the (short term) stimulation history into account. The duration and temporal dynamics of this so-called washout period depends on the kind of motor symptom studied. It has been reported to be longer for akinesia (minutes - hours) as opposed to rigidity (minutes). Thus it can be hypothesized, that the dynamics of the washout effects for the motor symptoms and for the neural markers are not the same. The applicants of this proposal want to make a substantial step forward into the direction of a fully closed-loop aDBS system. To reach this goal, it is necessary to develop data analysis methods for brain signals, which are capable of identifying the aforementioned informative neural markers, and to utilize them as input to decode the current motor state. For both tasks, machine learning methods have been successfully investigated and utilized in the context of closed loop BCI systems. Methods developed in this field allow for single-trial decoding of non-invasive EEG signals and invasive signals like ECoG and LPF. The machine learning methods enable the detection of movement intentions in single-trial and the decoding imagined or executed movements. Furthermore, latest research of the applicants has shown, that BCI approaches allow to even predict the task performance of an upcoming motor task, which may be valuable information for brain state dependent closed-loop applications.