- New research shows why immunotherapy can be effective at treating cancerous tumors that spread to the brain while glioblastoma – a cancer that originates in the brain – doesn’t respond well to such treatments.
- Tumors that originate elsewhere in the body are “primed” to respond to immunotherapy while glioblastoma doesn’t have this characteristic.
- Future research, early intervention, and personalized therapies can help increase understanding, along with improving survival rates.
New research out of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) could help aid our understanding of why some cancerous brain tumors respond well to immunotherapy while others do not.
Researchers from UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center shared their data today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
They investigated why glioblastoma – an aggressive cancer that originates in the brain – is so difficult to treat while other brain tumors respond well to immunotherapy treatment.
“The reasoning to do this work was mainly to see what the anti-tumor immune response was like in cancers where immunotherapy is known to elicit true clinical responses, then we could compare and contrast with the anti-tumor immune response in primary brain tumors like glioblastoma in which immunotherapy does not typically induce a clinically meaningful impact,” said Robert Prins, PhD, a senior study author and a professor of molecular and medical pharmacology and neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Researchers said they hope the data can pave the way to an improved understanding of the mechanisms at play between immunotherapy and brain tumors.
A significant difference between glioblastoma and other cancerous tumors that affect the brain is that glioblastoma originates in the brain, whereas other tumors often originate elsewhere in the body and spread to the brain.
Immunotherapy is often effective when treating other tumors, but it generally fails to elicit a response…
Read the full article here