ITOC 2026 | The benefits of peripheral cancer vaccines for glioblastoma immunotherapy
David Giles, MD, PhD, Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, MO, provides an overview of the challenges in developing immunotherapies for glioblastoma, and the benefits of peripheral cancer vaccines in this space. Tumor cells are not the primary issue, as they can elicit a good immune response when in the periphery, and immune cells can subsequently access the brain. Peripheral vaccination can overcome this by coordinating the presence of immune cells and allowing them mature and develop an effective immune response before accessing the brain. This interview took place at 12th Immunotherapy of Cancer (ITOC) Conference in Munich, Germany.
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Transcript
Yeah. So in glioblastoma, there’s kind of three things that people point to as why immunotherapies don’t work at baseline. One of them could be the tumor cells themselves. They’re not very responsive to the therapy. One of them is that immune cells don’t have access to the brain. And the third is that there’s not enough access of the drugs that we use, the therapies that we use to the brain itself...
Yeah. So in glioblastoma, there’s kind of three things that people point to as why immunotherapies don’t work at baseline. One of them could be the tumor cells themselves. They’re not very responsive to the therapy. One of them is that immune cells don’t have access to the brain. And the third is that there’s not enough access of the drugs that we use, the therapies that we use to the brain itself. This technology, using a live cell vaccination approach, helps us prove that the cells are actually not the problem. If you put the cells in the periphery, you can get a good immune response. So the cells are not the problem. It also tells us that immune cells can get in the brain because you generate a peripheral vaccination that impacts an intracranial pathology. So it really gets down to what do we need to do and actually get all the pieces together. The problem seems to be that you don’t get the immune cells and the therapy and the right tumor cells in the brain coordinated all at once, but by using peripheral vaccination we can coordinate all those pieces in the periphery and then they can gain access once they’ve matured or once they’ve developed that effective immune response. They can get access to the brain and effective immunity in that site.
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