Brain cancers are particularly difficult to treat, but at last there’s hope that a technique that has worked well for some other cancers could be adapted to treat glioblastoma.
There are currently very few options for treating glioblastomas, a type of cancer that forms from the brain’s support cells. On average, a person dies within 15 months of a glioblastoma diagnosis.
Now of the University of North Carolina and his team have had promising results in mice using a technique used for other types of cancer. CAR-T treatments are made by taking ordinary T cells – a type of immune cell – from a person with cancer and genetically engineering them to target and attack cancer cells.
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The technique was first tried in 2013, curing a person of an otherwise fatal blood cancer within 8 days, but such approaches are not widespread yet, and are more difficult to apply to solid tumours.
Disappearing tumours
Dotti’s team may now have managed this for glioblastomas in mice. They have identified a molecule that is on the surface of cells in around two-thirds of glioblastoma tumours, but is not present on healthy cells. They engineered CAR-T cells to target this molecule, and gave them to ten mice that had been given human glioblastoma tumours.
This caused the tumours to disappear in six of the mice. Tumours continued growing in the other four mice treated, and ten control mice given unaltered T cells.
Dotti says the team hopes to start testing their approach in people next year, in around 19 people. If they get similar results, this would be a big step for glioblastoma treatment – at present, the only option for patients is surgery.
Read more: Radical therapies that could beat my brain tumour
