Researchers have identified a possible way to make glioblastoma cells vulnerable to different types of immunotherapy. The strategy, which they demonstrated in cells in the lab, forces brain cancer cells to display targets for the immune system to attack.
Even treated with the most advanced therapies, patients with glioblastoma -- an aggressive brain cancer -- typically survive less than two years after diagnosis. Efforts to treat this cancer with the latest immunotherapies have been unsuccessful, likely because glioblastoma cells have few, if any, natural targets for the immune system to attack.
For this study, Wang's team took advantage of the fact that transposable elements naturally can cause a tumor to churn out random proteins that are unique to the tumor and not present in normal cells. Called tumor antigens or neoantigens, these unusual proteins could be the targets for immunotherapies, such as checkpoint inhibitors, antibodies, vaccines and genetically engineered T cell therapies.
Before investigating this strategy in people, the researchers are seeking ways to target the epigenetic therapy so that only the tumor cells are induced to make neoantigens. In the new study, the researchers cautioned that normal cells also produced targets when exposed to the two drugs. Even though normal cells didn't produce as many neoantigens as the glioblastoma cells did, Wang and Kim said there is a risk of unwanted side effects if normal cells create these targets as well.
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