--- title: Cancer Treatment Breakthrough: How Basket Trials Can Benefit Patients description: Earlier this year, TIME explored the promise of precision medicine in treating cancer patients. We featured one woman who was taking a drug typically used for melanoma to treat her brain tumor. Here’s an update on how she’s doing. canonical: https://time.com/4003454/how-doctors-cured-this-womans-brain-cancer/ author: Alice Park article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-08-19T21:32:23.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:41:30.437Z article:section: Health og:title: How Precision Medicine Possibly Cured This Woman’s Brain Cancer og:description: Earlier this year, TIME explored the promise of precision medicine in treating cancer patients. We featured one woman who was taking a drug typically used for melanoma to treat her brain tumor. Here’s an update on how she’s doing. og:url: https://time.com/4003454/how-doctors-cured-this-womans-brain-cancer/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbb2ef701239044dd/69886016e53aba82074df2c0/maryann-anselmo-zuckerman-research-center-cancer.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: MaryAnn Anselmo Memorial Sloan Kettering og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How Precision Medicine Possibly Cured This Woman’s Brain Cancer twitter:description: Earlier this year, TIME explored the promise of precision medicine in treating cancer patients. We featured one woman who was taking a drug typically used for melanoma to treat her brain tumor. Here’s an update on how she’s doing. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbb2ef701239044dd/69886016e53aba82074df2c0/maryann-anselmo-zuckerman-research-center-cancer.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # How Doctors Cured This Woman's Brain Cancer > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Health Matters: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Health Matters is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. The latest health news and expert advice on living well. Health Matters makes the fast-moving world of health more useful, surprising and human, from the latest science and medical breakthroughs to practical ideas for living better. 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It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ## Video: Inside The Operating Room During Awake Surgery [Watch (HLS stream): Inside The Operating Room During Awake Surgery](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/lyJruvm0.m3u8) (4:57)  _Published 2015-03-02. Brittany Capone is having a benign tumor removed from her brain and because it is so close to her speech center, surgeons will keep her awake and talk to her during the procedure_  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Aug 19, 2015 9:32 PM UTC  MaryAnn Anselmo in New York City on March 13, 2015 MaryAnn Anselmo in New York City on March 13, 2015 Christopher Morris—VII for TIME  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Aug 19, 2015 9:32 PM UTC In November 2013, [MaryAnn Anselmo—who was on the cover of _TIME_ in March—](http://time.com/3750523/the-cancer-gap/)heard the words that most of us dread the most: she had cancer. Worse, it was stage 4 glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive brain tumor that often takes a patient’s life in a matter of months. Having just recovered from a devastating car accident, Anselmo thought, “Somebody wants me dead here.” Nearly two years later, the New Jersey resident is receiving some completely different, and more welcome news. “The latest scan doesn’t show any tumor any more,” her physician, Dr. David Hyman, acting director of Developmental Therapeutics ad Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), tells TIME. The results from Hyman’s most recent study, which Anselmo participated in, is published in the latest issue of the [_New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)_](http://www.nejm.org/). “I’m tired all the time,” she says, “but I’m dealing with it, living with it. I feel awesome compared to what this tumor could have done to me.” **MORE:** [The Cancer Gap](http://time.com/3750523/the-cancer-gap/) Hyman is reluctant to call it a “cure” for certain cancers—the burden of proof is higher than this one study or this one patient—but Anselmo’s cancer is gone. And for that, Anselmo can thank something called a basket trial, a new way for doctors to test promising cancer treatments that more precisely target the right therapies to the right patients at the right time. This is the first such trial of its kind. The trial puts the idea of precision medicine to the test. At 23 cancer centers around the world, 122 patients with advanced cancer signed up for a last-resort treatment covered in the new study. All had their tumor genomes sequenced, so doctors could get a better sense of which mutations were driving the cancers, and whether there were any targeted therapies for those mutations. Anselmo had three mutations fueling the growth in her brain, but she and her doctors at MSKCC decided to focus on one, called BRAF. A recently approved drug to treat BRAF mutations in melanoma helped shrink or halt tumor growth in half of treated patients, so doctors wanted to know whether the drug could help patients with the same mutation but with different kinds of cancer, like Anselmo. But while BRAF mutations occur in about 50% of melanoma cases, they are much rarer in other types of cancers. So creating a trial for patients like Anselmo would take both time and money that researchers couldn’t justify. A basket trial, however, capitalizes on the growing understanding that cancers should be characterized by not just _where_ they start (in the breast, colon or lung, for example) but also by _how_ they grow — which mutations are driving them. A basket trial collects patients, all of whom have BRAF mutations, for instance, but who might have different types of cancer. In the _NEJM_ study, patients with non small cell lung cancer, colon cancer, thyroid cancer, multiple myeloma and, glioblastomas, among others, were included. By studying them as a group, Hyman says it’s possible to get a better idea of how feasible it is to target mutations like BRAF among those who don’t have melanoma. So far, the results are encouraging. Patients with non small cell lung cancer seemed to have the best response rate to vemurafenib, 42%, after a year. More than 70% of the patients with this cancer saw their tumors shrink by at least 30% in length. There were promising signs that patients with the other, untreatable cancers also responded and took longer before their tumors progressed than they would have without the experimental therapy. Anselmo was among the extraordinary responders. “It is unusual,” says Hyman of the apparent shrinkage of her tumor. “She really is an outlier in any way you measure it.”  Anselmo's brain tumor at the start of the study in 2014 (left) and on Aug. 11, 2015 (right) NEJM 373; 8; 2015\. Courtesy Dr. David Hyman: But it’s precisely for patients like Anselmo that basket trials are being considered — the possibility that there may be one, two or however many patients who, rather than facing a poor prognosis with existing or non-existent options for treating their disease, may have a chance, however small, of living longer and even controlling their cancer. “One of the things that gets lost when we talk averages and medians is how many patients benefit and for how long,” says Hyman. “There is a tremendous range and a concern that promoting the best successes sets the bar very high. But it also lets people know that things are not entirely hopeless, that there are people who have tremendous benefit from therapies and not get completely caught up in medians and averages.” That being said, Hyman cautions that more work needs to be done to better apply the principles of precision medicine to improve patients’ outcomes. Since most tumors have many mutations, how can doctors determine which one, or ones, to target with drugs? Why do some patients respond very well, while others do not? Another looming question has to do with how cancer doctors can start to incorporate what they are learning about mutations and cancer-causing pathways with their more traditional knowledge based on where tumors start. In the study, for example, patients with BRAF colon cancers did not respond to vemurafenib; but some started to show responses when vemurafenib was combined with another drug, cetuximab. That suggests that knowing where the cancer originates may still be an important part of the puzzle in figuring out which treatments might work best for which types of cancers. In an editorial accompanying the study, researchers at the T.H. Chan Harvard School of Public Health and Boston University note that basket trials may be just the first step in a precision medicine approach to cancer. Once doctors figure out which types of cancers might respond best to, for example, a BRAF-focused drug, they might conduct additional trials on each of these cancers to determine which patients, like Anselmo, would benefit most. For her, the trail has provided the chance to sing again. A jazz vocalist, she performed at a friend’s birthday party and attended a song-writing retreat in upstate New York. She makes weekly visits to her doctors — to the dermatologist to monitor any side effects from the drug, to Hyman every two months for a brain scan, and to get lab tests done to check on her immune system. And she’s tired all the time. “But that’s par for the course,” she says. “I’m just lucky to be alive at a time when cancer care is so different than it was years ago. Who would have known that treatments could be so customized? It’s so amazing, and I’m very thankful to be a part of it.” ## Transcript Are you pretty comfortable dear? The first time I found out I had a tumor, I was 20. Where do you live dear? I would go get something and when I got there, I wouldn't know what I was going to get. Do you know where you are? I couldn't remember things good, so I was nervous. So that it's crazy. [ MUSIC ] I just want water. I first heard about the surgery, where I would have to be awake, about a month ago. It's not a matter of being awake or not. It's just the whole thing about having surgery of the brain period, is going to be, like, the hardest thing. Very nervous. I'm a nervous guy. [ LAUGH ] It's going to be the longest four hours of our life. We just hope this all turns out good, that's all. No. You did not get me a teddy bear. What am I going to do with this thing? [ LAUGH ] [ INAUDIBLE ] [ APPLAUSE ] [ LAUGH ] Brit baby. What? A few more hours it'll be all over. Thank god, I'm tired. So how do you guys all feel? We want it to be over. That's all. If they would let me scrub up, I would love to come in the operating room. I would love it. The idea is to take out the tumor and leave the brains behind. [ MUSIC ] It's sort of a misnomer. You're not awake for the entire procedure. For most of the surgery, you're gonna be quite deeply sedated so that you won't be aware [ CROSSTALK ] It's not terribly traumatic for patients. I always reassure them that we're gonna sedate them. We're not gonna put them to sleep except during the opening and the closing. You're going to be really comfortable. You're going to be surprised. One of the most important people in the room is anesthesiologists. No smiling, no laughing. If you go to sleep smiling you wake up smiling. [ LAUGH ] The art part of this is tailoring those medications to the point where the patient is sufficiently sedated that they tolerate the procedure. Timeout, this is. Brittany Capone, she has a left posterior temporal tumor. Everybody agree we're on the left side? Yup. [ MUSIC ] [ INAUDIBLE ] Left sided tumors we we're worried about speech. And it includes both motor speech and receptive speech. Name a word that starts with B. Brittany. Brittany, there ya go. You can hear the sort of a cadence the patient gets into. And if you notice any hesitancy we can, we could hear it instantaneously. Name something you paint with. Paint brush. That's. The most memorable ones now are, are the, the patients who, who carry on interesting conversations with us during surgery. No fennel. I like fennel too. The whole thing is pretty surreal actually. But reassuring all that's reassuring to us. What time is it? It's ten o'clock. You got a date? You got a date? Do I get to see the tumor? No. Not really. It's going to be hard for you to see it. Are you going to put me back to sleep? Very soon, yes. After the scalp is closed and the head is bandaged, we turn off all the medication. And the patient will wake up. Brittany. Brittany. Brittany. Can you open your eyes? Brittany? It's really, quite amazing how quickly they wake up and how bright and alert they are, after several hours of neuro surgery. Show me your teeth. Big smile. Smile, smile, smile. Good. Stick out your tongue. Good. Craniotomy is not a terribly painful operation. It's not like a chest surgery or an abdominal surgery. Can you lift this leg up? The next day you're walking on the ward after a craniotomy. Try to touch my hand here. There's just not much to hurt in the brain. That's the good thing. Today's a sunny day in New York city. [ MUSIC ] Today is a sunny day in New York City. Mmhm. [ MUSIC ] ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4003454/how-doctors-cured-this-womans-brain-cancer/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4003454/how-doctors-cured-this-womans-brain-cancer/"},"headline":"How Doctors Cured This Woman's Brain Cancer","datePublished":"2015-08-19T21:32:23.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:41:30.437Z","description":"Earlier this year, TIME explored the promise of precision medicine in treating cancer patients. We featured one woman who was taking a drug typically used for melanoma to treat her brain tumor. 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