New immunotherapy shows promise against brain tumors in mice by Catharine Paddock

For the first time, scientists have shown that a new type of immunotherapy can reach and treat brain cancer from the bloodstream in mice. The nano-immunotherapy stopped brain tumor cells multiplying and increased survival.

Scientists who devised an immunotherapy that can cross the blood-brain barrier in mice hope that the findings may one day translate to humans.

The researchers believe that the new treatment could be the key to improving survival in people with glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive type of brain cancer.

Checkpoint inhibitors are drugs that help the immune system fight cancer. In the new immunotherapy, the drugs can remove a mechanism that enables the brain tumor to withstand attack from cancer-killing cells.

The blood-brain barrier is a unique feature of the vessels that supply blood to the brain and the rest of the central nervous system. The barrier stops potentially harmful toxins and pathogens from entering brain tissue from the bloodstream.

To date, promising types of immunotherapy that have passed clinical trials have not been very successful at crossing the blood-brain barrier.

"Although our findings were not made in humans," says senior study author Julia Y. Ljubimova, a professor of neurosurgery and biomedical sciences at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA, "they bring us closer to developing a treatment that might effectively attack brain tumors with [systemic] drug administration."

Using drugs that can treat the brain systemically — that is, by using the bloodstream to deliver them — would be an advantage over treatments that only work when doctors inject them directly into brain tissue.

The new study is also the first to describe an immunotherapy that can stimulate immune systems both throughout the body and local to the tumor in mice.

An aggressive brain cancer

Although they only represent a small percentage of cancer cases, brain cancers account for a disproportionate number of deaths.

According to the National Cancer Institute, which is one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an estimated 23,820 people in the United States will find out that they have brain cancer in 2019, and 17,760 will die of the disease in this same year.

Source: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326220.php