Personalized T Cell Immunotherapy For Pediatric Brain Tumors

Treating hard-to-treat pediatric brain tumors with personalized T cell immunotherapy might soon become a reality as per a pre-clinical study at the Children's National Hospital, published in Nature Communications.

The study team developed a new approach that discovered unique proteins in an individual tumor's cells (that holds specificity for the tumor-specific neoantigens and the ability to kill tumor cells) by combining both genetic sequencing and protein identification.

‘Treating hard-to-treat pediatric brain tumors with personalized T cell immunotherapy might soon become a reality’

This further helped the scientists to generate personalized T cells to target and kill medulloblastoma (malignant brain tumor) in children.

This can be done by training patients' own T cells to recognize their tumor's unique neoantigens and are then reinfused back into the patient. The team is further designing a phase I clinical trial that is scheduled to open in 12--18 months.

"This work is an incredibly exciting advancement in personalized medicine. It will allow us to treat patients with a novel T cell therapy that is developed for each individual patient to specifically attack and kill their tumor. This treatment will offer a potential option for children with hard-to-treat brain tumors for which all other therapeutic options have been exhausted," says Catherine Bollard, M.D., M.B.Ch.B., director of the Center for Cancer and Immunology Research at Children's National and co-senior author on the paper.

Source: Medindia