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A Promising Brain Tumor Vaccine

Louise Bonn, Staff Writer
April 19, 2012
Filed under News

A group of doctors have just discovered a vaccine that can cure brain tumors. The vaccine was made from a brain cancer patients’ own tumor cells. A new study showed that the vaccine led to a fifty percent improvement for patients with glioblastoma multiforme.

The vaccine increased the average survival to 48 weeks, shown on 40 patients with gliobastoma in a phase 2 multicenter trial. Gliobastoma is a brain cancer that kills patients within 15 months of diagnosis. Patients who did not receive the treatment had 33 weeks of survival. For the vaccinated group, the six-month survival rate was six 93 percent and 86 other gliobastoma who were treated with other therapies had a 68 percent six-month survival rate.

“We’ve done a lot of things for this kind of tumor in the last 40 or 50 years, all variations on different chemotherapies that haven’t really panned out,” said Dr. Jonas Sheehan, director of neuro-oncology at the Penn State Cancer Institute. He was not involved in the study.

Dr. Sheehan also said, “What we’ve known needed to happen for a while now is a revolution — a totally new way of approaching these tumors. This is an example of a totally new paradigm.”

Gliobastomas are more common in men than in women. They typically occur to men between the ages of 50 and 70. Every year, about a quarter of 18,500 brain tumors are gliobastomas. The treatments for brain tumors are surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.

The lead investigator for the study, Dr. Andrew Parsa, the vice president of neurological surgery in the University of Southern California, said, “It’s the only therapy in the clinical realm that has a reasonable chance of doing this, because we can’t give patients chemotherapy (because of toxicity) for unlimited amounts of time.”

Parsa also said that the vaccine can be a “total game-changer” in the near future.

“The hope is that we’ll go from a survival of 15 months to a meaningful difference. We’re looking to go from 15 months to five years, a quantum leap forward,” said Dr. Sheehan.

The data and conclusions in this study are to be viewed as a preliminary until it is published in a peer-reviewed journal, because it is to be presented at a medical meeting.