ASCO22: Glioblastoma research by David Reardon, MD
Glioblastoma study shows combination immunotherapy is safe and early data on effectiveness is encouraging. Dana-Farber's David Reardon, MD, details more at #ASCO22 about the combination of a potent vaccine platform with immune checkpoint blockade.
we're reporting mature results of a clinical trial. We lead combining a novel immunotherapy approach for glioblastoma patients. Glioblastoma is the most common and deadliest cancer that arises in the brain in adult patients and it hasn't responded well to therapies historically, including many initial immunotherapy treatments. We designed a combination of immunotherapy treatments to try to overcome some of those hurdles and allow our immune system to attack the more successfully. The vaccine we utilized is an innovative and novel approach using what's called DNA plasmas, which encode markers associated with glioblastoma. And those plasmas are injected into patients along with a molecule called IL 12, which naturally works in our body to help enhance our immune system's response. Secondly, we combined this vaccine with a PD one blocker that takes the brakes off the immune system and allows the immune system to respond more robustly. In the trial where we combined these two entities together, we report in our presentation that the treatment was very well tolerated. There were no significant side effects that patients lived longer that they had encouraging survival benefit associated with the immunotherapy treatment and we saw significant responses in the peripheral blood of patients that the immunotherapy was working and their immune systems were responding to this approach. So we're very excited about this first combinatorial approach for our patients, which may give us some insight and a building block to develop better immunotherapy treatments for glioblastoma patients
