Revolutionary immunotherapy finds new hope in fight against brain cancer

Cancer treatments often involve surgical removal of tumors, administration of anticancer drugs, and radiation therapy. In recent years, immunotherapy , which uses the body's immune system to attack cancer cells, has also been attracting attention. The news site Intelligencer explains immunotherapy for glioblastoma , a type of malignant tumor that can develop in the brain.

Immunotherapy Is Transforming Cancer Treatment and Oncology
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/cancer-treatment-immunotherapy-oncology-tcells-brain-tumor.html

Glioblastoma, also known as glioblastoma, is a tumor that grows in the glial cells that make up the nervous system of the brain. Glioblastoma is a type of brain tumor that develops from the brain cells, and is known to be the most common type of malignant brain tumor. Glioblastoma can occur at any age, and the tumor can cause seizures, speech disorders, and paralysis, with the average time from diagnosis to death being about one year.

The treatment for glioblastoma has been 'maximum safe resection,' which means surgically removing as much of the tumor as possible while maintaining neurological function. However, glioblastoma has a high ability to infiltrate the brain, and even if most of the tumor is removed, it often grows back.

Massachusetts General Hospital researchers Dr. Marcella Maus and Dr. Brian Choi have conducted clinical trials of a new treatment that involves genetically modifying a patient's own T cells and injecting them directly into the cerebrospinal fluid.

T cells are immune cells that fight off pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, and parasites, but they are not usually effective against cancer cells. Therefore, Dr. Mouse and his colleagues extracted T cells from the patient's blood and engineered their DNA into 'CAR-T cells' that react to cancer cells.

CAR-T cells are designed to react to specific proteins on the surface of glioblastoma cancer cells. The idea of 'attacking cancer cells with CAR-T cells' has been studied for some time, and Dr. Mouse has been conducting experiments and research for many years.

As a result of the clinical trial, a 74-year-old man who was a subject of the clinical trial had recurrent glioblastoma, but his tumor almost completely disappeared within a few days. Daniel Haber, director of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Cancer Center, commented, 'At that moment, a revolution in our understanding of cancer and our treatment tools began.'

However, the immunotherapy studied by Dr. Mouse and others has problems such as 'high cost,' 'complex process,' 'only a limited number of patients can be treated at one time,' and 'long-term effects are unclear.' In addition, the subjects in the clinical trial were not completely cured, and there were cases where the tumor recurred several months after it disappeared, or gastrointestinal perforation was caused by side effects of the drug.

However, Dr. Maus and his team said they hope that CAR-T cell immunotherapy may be applicable to cancers other than glioblastoma. The treatment they are developing is attracting attention as a new hope for cancers that have been difficult to treat until now.