Brain tumor: the new vaccine that can help prevent it

Prevent and even cure the brain tumor. This is the ambitious goal of the new vaccine studied by a team of American scientists.

As can also be read in an article that appeared in the British newspaper independentthe study was conducted by the team of Khalid Shah, del Brigham and Women’s Hospital (USA) and published in the magazine Science Translational Medicine.

Potential cancer vaccines have already been studied over the years but the turning point, in this case, is represented by mechanism to the base: “Our team pursued a simple idea: take cancer cells and turn them into vaccines and anticancer drugs.”, indeed says Shah«Through genetic engineering, we are reusing cancer cells to develop a therapy that kills cancer cells and stimulate the immune system to both destroy primary tumors and prevent cancer“.

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Brain tumor vaccine: how it works

Instead of using inactivated tumor cells, as is usually the case, the team thought of in fact reuse live tumor cellswhich they have though an unusual feature. Like carrier pigeons, living cancer cells they travel long distances through the brain to return to the site of their similar cells. Taking advantage of this unique property, the Shah team has so engineered living cancer cells using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool and reused them to release the agent that kills cancer cells. Not only that, engineered cancer cells have been designed to express factors that they can facilitate the immune system to identify, label and remember themthus triggering a long-term antitumor response.

The experimentation

The team tested CRISPR-enhanced and decoded therapeutic cancer cells (ThTC), in different strains of mice, including one containing cells of human origin, thus mimicking the human immune microenvironment. L’innovative dual action cell therapy was found to be safe, applicable, and effective in these models. Although of course further studies and investigations will be neededthis therapeutic approach may prove to be applicable to a wider range of solid tumors.

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Gliobastoma: what it is

As the article in theindependentthe brain cancer and especially glioblastoma affecting around 2,500 people in the UK each year, it is often incurable. According to theHigher Institute of Health the gliobastoma is in fact a very aggressive form of cancer which accounts for about 45% of all cancers that originate in the brain. The practice to date usually requires the use of a surgery and to slow down its progression with the pharmacological therapy.

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