A family friend flew to Germany recently to enroll
in a clinical study using an experimental treatment for her glioblastoma. Turns out that this treatment involves
dendritic cell vaccinations. I don't
know the specifics of her clinical study, but I found a similar study in the
United States at Cedars Sinai which provided the details for this posting (Phuphanich et al., 2012).
Researchers extracted white blood cells
from the 17 subjects, then pulsed them in the lab with six tumor-associated
antigens (TAA) that are found on glioblastoma multiforme cells. After each subject completed surgery and radiation,
these cells were re-introduced through three different vaccinations given two
weeks apart. Preliminary results of the study
showed an increase in the median progression-free survival to 16.9 months
(standard is 6.9 months), and an overall survival median of 38.4 months.
Patients who had four of the six TAAs
expressed in large numbers responded especially well to the vaccine, and a positive
correlation was found between the size of the immune response and length of
progression-free survival. In addition,
a protein (CD133) that is associated with the stem cells of a glioblastoma was
decreased after the vaccinations. This
study suggests using dendritic cells to create a vaccine that targets antigens found
on glioblastoma cells could be an effective treatment against this form of
cancer.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (2012,
August 15). Vaccine targets malignant brain cancer antigens, significantly lengthens survival. ScienceDaily.
Retrieved September 30, 2012, from
http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2012/08/120815093108.htm
Phuphanich, S., Wheeler, C. J., Rudnick,
J. D., Mazer, M., Wang, H., Nuño, M. A., Richardson, J.
E., Fan, X., Ji, J., Chu, R. M., Bender, J. G., Hawkins, E. S., Patil, C. G., Black,
K. L., Yu, J. S. (2012). Phase I trial of a multi-epitope-pulsed dendritic
cell vaccine for patients with
newly diagnosed glioblastoma. Cancer Immunology, Immunotherapy. DOI:
10.1007/s00262-012-1319-0
This is a really interesting treatment method. Yet, in terms of TAAs CD133 is not a glioblastoma specific antigen as it is also expressed on stem cells of the hematopoetic system including endothelial progenitor cells. So conceivably this could do damage to those cells as well. Is the thought that the treatment would be short-term and therefore any consequential damage would be acute and not chronic? In addition, I wonder if they are seeing any immediate affects or what the long-term effects might be?
ReplyDeleteInteresting !!! so I actually did some more research and I found this great video which is kind of long, but helpful.
ReplyDelete(http://youtu.be/da9z30QsE9k).Its actually a presentation by Edgar Engleman for the Stanford School of Medicine Medcast lecture series.
At the end I have to say that the sad thing about these kind of new treatments is that the average person cannot benefit from all this because they are moslty so expensive. Even just researching more and doing different experiments to get better and accurate results is so costly.
A little glitch in Negar Saber's link: it's
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/da9z30QsE9k
This method is really interesting!! but it sounds to me like there would be dangerous side effects, i will like to do more research about this topic
ReplyDelete