Personal vaccine doubles brain cancer patient survival time | Science Blog
A dendritic cell vaccine personalized for each individual based on the patient’s own tumor may increase median survival time in those with a deadly form of brain cancer called glioblastoma, an early-phase study at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has found.
Published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Cancer Research, the study also identified a subset of patients more likely to respond to the vaccine — those with a subtype of glioblastoma known as mesenchymal, which accounts for about one-third of all cases. This is the first time in brain cancer research that a subset of patients more likely to respond to an immunotherapy has been identified, said the study’s senior author, Dr. Linda Liau, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher and a professor of neurosurgery.
The study found that the vaccine, administered after conventional surgery and radio-chemotherapy, was associated with a median survival of 31.4 months, double the 15 months of historical controls in the published literature. In all, 23 patients were enrolled in the Phase I study, which was launched in 2003. Of those, about one-third are still alive, some more than eight years after their diagnosis.
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