Harnessing the body's B-cells to fight tumors may be a promising treatment for glioblastoma, according to a Northwestern Medicine study recently published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation . Glioblastoma, one of the most complex and treatment-resistant cancers, has a five-year survival rate of just 6.9 percent, according to the National Brain Tumor Society.
The average length of survival is estimated to be around 14–20 months, a figure that has barely improved in decades. While glioblastoma is notoriously difficult to treat, previous research has shown the promise of a new type of therapy that utilizes the immune system's own B-cells to target tumors, said Catalina Lee-Chang, Ph.D.
, assistant professor of Neurological Surgery and senior author of the new study. "Our previous work published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine showed a proof-of-concept that we could utilize a very specialized type of B-cells as a therapeutic," Lee-Chang said. "We really focus on one function of B-cells, which is the activation of CD8 T-cells," a specialized type of defensive immune cell which are tailored to fight specific pathogens.
In the current study, Lee-Chang and her collaborators set out to test the effectiveness of B-cell vaccines (BVax) and the antibodies they promote to fight glioblastoma tumors. First, the investigators administered B-cell vaccines to mice with the cancer and conducted immunoproteomics and functional assays. They observed that B-cell vaccines were able t.
