Personalized Vaccine Increases Survival in Glioblastoma Patients

An early-phase, preliminary study conducted by investigators at the University of California in Los Angeles Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center revealed that administering a personalized dendritic cell vaccine to each patient suffering from glioblastoma increases their median survival time.

Glioblastoma is an incurable, highly-aggressive form of brain cancer, which acts incredibly fast, and whose outcome is almost always fatal. Instances of people defeating this disease are very rare.

Researchers have been desperate to catch a break in developing a way of addressing glioblastoma, but thus far their efforts have remained largely fruitless. The UCLA team may have therefore brought some hope where there was none before.

According to the JCCC team, their managed to get the vaccine to work by modifying it based on readings collected from the tumors of each patient. For all intents and purposes, they created a personalized vaccine for every test subject.

In addition to this conclusion, the researchers also learned that a proportion of those suffering from this type of tumor are more likely to respond to treatment than others. Those subjects were suffering from a subtype of glioblastoma known as mesenchymal.

Mesenchymal glioblastoma affects about 33 percent of all patients developing this condition, therefore the new study could help save countless lives around the world. Details of the work appear in last week's issue of the peer-reviewed medical journal Clinical Cancer Research.

JCCC researcher and a professor of neurosurgery Dr. Linda Liau, also the senior author of the paper, explains that this is the first time when studies have identifies a subgroup of glioblastoma patients more likely to respond to treatment than others.

“This is quite an encouraging result, especially in an early-phase study like this. It's promising to see patients with this type of brain cancer experience such long survivals,” Liau explains.

“The body may have trouble fighting cancer because the immune system doesn't recognize it as a foreign invader. The dendritic cells activate the patient's T cells to attack the tumor, basically teaching the immune system to respond to the tumor,” she adds.

According to statistics, the median survival time after the disease is discovered is usually 15 months or less. After the UCLA team administered the vaccine that survival time increased to 31.4 months, more than double the initial amount.

The investigation was made possible by funds provided by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Philip R. and Kenneth A. Jonsson Foundation, the Neidorf Family Foundation, STOP Cancer, the Ben & Catherine Ivy Foundation and Northwest Biotherapeutics Inc.