Ongoing clinical trial to treat a brain tumor with vaccines

2010/01/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Medikuntza

The Clínica Universitaria de Navarra has launched a clinical trial to assess to what extent an immune treatment is effective to treat glioblastomas - one of the most aggressive and common brain tumors. They point out that in Spain, at present, only they are conducting an investigation of this type.

The hypothesis on which the trial is based is that the immune system itself is capable of recognizing and destroying tumor cells. This capacity is because the external markers of tumor cells differ from those of healthy cells.

During the trial, custom vaccines will be made available to patients. Vaccines are made through their own healthy and tumor cells. By removing the tumor in patients and its processing, specialists obtain proteins from the surface of tumor cells. They then extend the dendritic cells of the immune system. Thus, dendritic cells capture tumor proteins as antigens.

That's basically the vaccine. When incorporated into the patients, blood lymphocytes will detect tumor particles containing dendritic cells in the membrane and will produce an immune response to them by antibodies.

However, the immune system has a limited ability to fight tumor cells and, if the tumor is large, the immune system is unable to control it. Therefore, the new therapy will be combined with conventional treatment: first the tumor will be removed by surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy sessions will be conducted, and then the vaccine will be given to them. In this way they will be able to leave the least possible amount of tumors to be able to fight this immune system.