The chemotherapeutic drug decitabine (decitabine) in combination with T-cell immunotherapy in the future may become a new standard treatment for glioblastoma, one of the most dangerous brain tumors.
This conclusion was made by American researchers after a series of experiments on laboratory mice with brain cancer.
Glioblastoma is considered to be the most aggressive primary brain tumor, in which all currently available treatment options remain insufficiently effective.
Perhaps the discovery of scientists from the University of California in Los Angeles will help change this situation.
On the pages of the professional journal Neuro-Oncology, Dr. Robert Prins and his colleague Linda Liau reported that the chemotherapy drug decitabine in combination with genetically modified immune cells proved to be extremely effective in experimental animals and in the culture of human glioblastoma cells.
For their work, the researchers extracted and grown T lymphocytes that were reprogrammed using the gene NY-ESO-1 (New York Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma). For specialists: indeed, this gene has nothing to do with glioblastoma, but we will explain this further.. Then, as expected, genetically modified T cells were introduced into the body of patients with mouse cancer, which caused a powerful immune response against cancer cells.
Dr. Prince, Professor of Neurosurgery, Molecular and Clinical Pharmacology, writes: "Thanks to our marker, T-lymphocytes purposefully searched for and attacked glioblastoma cells. They are able to penetrate the blood-brain barrier and overtake even those tumor cells that migrate from the tumor mass. All this is very important in the treatment of aggressive tumors such as glioblastoma. If surgically we can remove the underlying tumor mass, it is absolutely impossible to find and cut out migrated cells that will in the future give a relapse of cancer ".
As explained by scientists, human glioblastoma cells do not contain the gene NY-ESO-1 - a gene of another type of cancer (squamous cell carcinoma of the esophagus). And now it becomes clear why scientists gave mice a decitabine. This drug causes glioblastoma cells to release a target substance for NY-ESO-1, following which as if by smell genetically modified T-lymphocytes rush to the tumor and attack it.
"Brain cancer cells are very nimble, they excel at the immune system of the host, because they do not carry the target proteins that our immune cells could recognize. Thanks to the reception of decitabine, these cells begin to produce such substances and become a tasty morsel for T-killers.
After that it is enough to introduce into the body more such killer cells, and they will find pockets of the tumor, wherever they are hiding, "says Dr. Liu.
A new method of treatment proved effective in more than 50% of cases of glioblastoma at an early stage. In the future, scientists plan to improve their method and conduct experiments on other models of brain cancer. If the results are satisfactory, then we can talk about clinical trials on volunteers.
medbe. en.