President Joe Biden’s son died of glioblastoma in 2015 at just 46 years old.
The incidence of glioblastoma is 1.6 times higher in men than in women and 2.0 times higher in Caucasians than in Africans and African-Americans.
A new experimental vaccine may hold hope for patients with glioblastoma, a type of incurable brain cancer. The double-action vaccine, tested in mice, kills existing tumors and prevents brain cancer from recurring in the future.
Scientists use living fragments of patients’ tumors and reprogram them to attack glioblastoma before reinjecting them into the body. From there, the redesigned living cancer cells make their way to the original tumor, allowing the immune system to mark and remember them as they travel.
Although it has only been tested on animals, the injection offers hope in treating a deadly cancer that kills virtually all patients within five years. Scientists are taking advantage of a new way to turn cancer cells into powerful anticancer agents.
In the latest work from the laboratory of Khalid Shah, MS, PhD, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham Health System, researchers have developed a new cell therapy approach to kill established tumors and induce long-term immunity, training the immune system so that it can prevent the cancer from coming back.
“Our team has pursued a simple idea: take cancer cells and transform them into vaccines and cancer killers,” stated lead author Khalid Shah, Director of the Center for Stem Cells and Translational Immunotherapy (CSTI) and vice chair for research in the Department of Neurosurgery at Brigham and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI). “Through genetic engineering, we are repurposing cancer cells to develop a therapeutic that kills tumor cells and stimulates the immune system to both destroy primary tumors and prevent cancer.”
Cancer vaccines are an active area of research for many labs, but the approach Shah and his colleagues have taken is different. Instead of using inactivated tumor cells, the team reuses live tumor cells, which have an unusual characteristic. Like homing pigeons, living tumor cells travel long distances through the brain to return to where their mates are.
Taking advantage of this unique property, Shah’s team manipulated live tumor cells using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool and repurposed them to deliver a tumor cell-killing agent. Furthermore, the modified tumor cells were engineered to express factors that make it easier for the immune system to detect, label and remember them, preparing the immune system for a long-term antitumor response.
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