The treatment of gliobastomas is a real challenge. These brain tumors, which affect more adults between the ages of 45 and 70, develop very rapidly, almost always in the hemispheres of our thinking organ , although they can also appear in the spinal cord and brainstem. Symptoms vary, but, in general, those affected – each year two or three cases are diagnosed for every one hundred thousand individuals – have persistent headaches, blurred or double vision, vomiting, loss of appetite, personality changes, irritability, difficulties speech and urinary incontinence.
Although they do not usually spread beyond the central nervous system, dealing with them is not easy. According to the American Association of Neurosurgeons, they are especially resistant to conventional therapies; in fact, they can have neurotoxic effects on nearby tissues. Its location, in the brain, and the limited capacity of this structure to self-repair are not helpful either.
Well, a team of researchers from the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and the biotechnology company Imvax has presented the results of clinical trials with a new vaccine that prevents tumor growth at an early stage, slows its recurrence and increases survival from the patients. What’s more, the scientists, who presented this breakthrough at the last meeting of the American Cancer Association in Atlanta, announced that the patients tolerated it well.
The experts reported that between September 2015 and March 2018 they had treated 33 individuals who had just been diagnosed with the ailment with the aforementioned vaccine, called IGV-001. When they compared the data with those they had collected from other subjects who had received radiation therapy, they observed a better response in the former. Thus, while the usual treatment contained between five and almost seven months the growth of the tumor or its reappearance, in those who had been administered the highest dose of the vaccine this time was prolonged to just over 10 months . Their survival, likewise, went from 14.6 months in the control group to 22.
An attack from within
In a statement, these scientists explain that, in essence, they developed the vaccine from the patient’s tumor cells that, in turn, are taken from the brain tumor, when it is surgically removed. They then treated the cells with an antisense oligodeoxynucleotide – a molecule that, among other things, stimulates the activation of the immune system – targeting a receptor that causes tumor growth and metastasis. Later, they were implanted under the skin of the abdomen of the patient.
In their conclusions, the researchers point out that the vaccine could be more effective in those with a less impaired immune system, as a consequence, for example, of having previously undergone other types of therapies. “The answer in some cases is very promising,” says neurosurgeon David Andrews, from the Vickie & Jack Farber Institute of Neuroscience, of the aforementioned US institution, and co-founder of Imvax. “We would like to start phase II of the trials this year. , with a wider group of people, and confirm the results ”.
