Glioblastoma brain tumors are particularly anxious. Inevitably fatal, the tumors occasionally respond to new immunotherapies after they grow back, allowing up to 20% of patients to survive well beyond the survival times. is expected.
What is causing this effect has long been the pursuit of researchers hoping to make use of immunotherapies to further extend life.
New insights from a team led by Duke’s Ton Preston Robert Tisch Tumor Center provide potential answers. The team found that recurrent glioblastoma tumors with very few tumors are far more vulnerable to immunotherapies than tumors resembling an abundance of mutations.
The result, appearing online Jan. 13 in the magazine Nature Communication, which could be a predictive biomarker to help clinicians target immunotherapies at those tumors most likely to respond. It could also lead to new approaches that create the conditions necessary for immunotherapies to be more effective.
It has been regrettable that glioblastoma is not inaccessible and we have made little progress in improving survival despite many promising approaches. “
David Ashley, MD, Ph.D., Study S.enior Author, P.Rofessor Departments of Neurosurgery, Medicine, Pediatrics and Pathology, Duke University School of Medicine
“We have been very successful with a number of different immunotherapies, including the Duke ‘s developed poliovirus therapy,” Ashley said. “And while it is encouraging that there is a subset of patients which performs well when the treatments are used to treat recurrent tumors, about 80% of patients still die. “
Ashley and colleagues performed genomic analyzes of recurrent glioblastoma tumors from patients treated at Duke with the poliovirus therapy as well as others who received so-called check-in immunosuppressants, a type of treatment that releasing the immune system to attack tumors.
In all treatment groups, patients with recurrent glioblastomas who had few mutations at the tumors survived longer than patients with highly mutated tumors. This was only true, however, for patients with recurrent tumors, not for patients with neonatal disease who have not yet received treatment.
“This suggests that chemotherapy, which is the standard of care for neonatal glioblastoma, may alter the inflammatory response in these tumors,” Ashley said, adding that chemotherapy may serve a role important as a primer to stimulate the evolution of inflammation. process in recurrent tumors.
Ashley said the finding in glioblastoma may also be related to other types of tumors, including renal and pancreatic cancers, which have similarly shown a correlation between low tumor mutations and a better response to immunotherapies.
Source:
Duke University Medical Center