ITOC 2026 | What does the future hold for live cell vaccines in treating brain tumors?
David Giles, MD, PhD, Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, MO, highlights two potential approaches for translating a brain tumor vaccine into a clinical treatment, either as an autologous vaccine where the tumor is removed, processed, and re-implanted, or as a platform to develop a next-generation therapy through a reverse-engineering approach to identify essential components and design principles. The latter approach has potential to lead to more effective treatments in the next several years. This interview took place at 12th Immunotherapy of Cancer (ITOC) Conference in Munich, Germany.
These works are owned by Magdalen Medical Publishing (MMP) and are protected by copyright laws and treaties around the world. All rights are reserved.
Transcript
Yeah, so there’s kind of two approaches you can think about in taking this for translation. So one of them is to treat this actually as an autologous vaccine. So in some of our mouse models, we’ve done that as a surgical approach. As a neurosurgeon, one of the things we can do is we can take out the brain tumor, we can process it in a particular way, and then re-implant that in patients...
Yeah, so there’s kind of two approaches you can think about in taking this for translation. So one of them is to treat this actually as an autologous vaccine. So in some of our mouse models, we’ve done that as a surgical approach. As a neurosurgeon, one of the things we can do is we can take out the brain tumor, we can process it in a particular way, and then re-implant that in patients. That is a workflow that has worked in mice and it’s possible for us to implement that in humans. And actually when I talk to my patients, when I talk to other donors and people, patient advocates, that’s the primary question is why can’t we just do this exact same thing in humans? And the answer is we can, but the more that we understand about the process, the more likely it is going to be effective down the road. So that’s kind of pathway one. The second pathway is, can we use this as a platform to develop a next-generation therapy? Can you essentially go through and say what components of the formulation of this vaccine are necessary? What antigens are necessary? When should I be delivering this? How should I combine it with other combinations? By using, in essence, a reverse-engineering approach, we can test what components of our vaccine model are necessary and use that to provide the design principles we need for next-generation therapy. I think that’s more likely the strategy we’ll have in the next two to five years here in getting this technology to patients.
This transcript is AI-generated. While we strive for accuracy, please verify this copy with the video.
Read more...
