ITOC 2026 | Engineering principles for effective glioblastoma vaccine development
David Giles, MD, PhD, Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, MO, comments on the importance of understanding engineering design principles in developing new immunotherapies for glioblastoma, highlighting the need for a platform to screen and identify potentially successful therapies. A novel peripheral vaccination has shown that live cells are a crucial component of effective vaccines, whereas modifications such as using lysates, fixed cells, or heat-damaged cells are not effective. This interview took place at 12th Immunotherapy of Cancer (ITOC) Conference in Munich, Germany.
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Transcript
So this really is a platform to kind of understand the engineering design principles we need to do as we develop new technologies. So a lot of the therapies and immunotherapies in glioblastoma right now have a little bit of signal that they work and then they get to larger trials and they don’t work. And so we have to have some way of screening and understanding what we think is going to be successful and what’s not...
So this really is a platform to kind of understand the engineering design principles we need to do as we develop new technologies. So a lot of the therapies and immunotherapies in glioblastoma right now have a little bit of signal that they work and then they get to larger trials and they don’t work. And so we have to have some way of screening and understanding what we think is going to be successful and what’s not. And this platform provides us that opportunity. So, for example, we asked whether it needs to be live cells that are part of the vaccine or whether it can use a lysate or use fixed cells or use cells that have been slightly damaged by heat but are still alive when you implant them. Notably, though, any of those modifications to the vaccine don’t work. And so this platform is a way for us to say, what design decisions do we need to make as we develop the new therapies? Live cells seem to be the thing that works. All these other variations don’t. And we’re now in the process of investigating further along those lines what needs to be a part of the vaccine in order to be effective.
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