Experimental Therapy Removes an Incurable Brain Tumor

Using ADI-PEG20 together with focal brain radiotherapy cures glioblastoma. This double treatment completely eliminated the tumor in the animal models.

ADI-PEG20 and focal brain radiotherapy cure glioblastoma, as per the study recently accepted for publication in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. This double treatment eliminated the tumor in the animal models used in the study.

This study was carried out by researchers from the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville: Dr. Manuel Sarmiento Soto, Dr. Juan García Revilla, and Dr. José Luis Venero, in collaboration with Dr. Nabil Hajji and Dr. Nel Syed of Imperial College London.

‘New treatment was identified for Glioblastoma, a terminal disease whose average life expectancy is less than 2 years.’
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Glioblastoma is a terminal disease whose average life expectancy is less than two years. The current treatments are based on more than 30 years old, as no significant advances have been made to combat this type of tumor efficiently.

The results of this study offer a new therapeutic option against glioblastoma: the use of the drug ADI-PEG20, which eliminates systemic arginine, in combination with the application of focal brain radiotherapy.

With this, it was possible to observe how a brain tumor, incurable to date, was eliminated in vivo models that died of natural causes without showing any manifestation of the disease.

About Brain Tumor
Brain tumors are the abnormal growth of brain cells that may be benign or metastatic. Brain tumors account for about 2.4% of all the tumor diagnosesandare most challenging due to their critically delicate location.

"With this new treatment, we were able to cure animals of an aggressive and terminal disease", says Dr. Sarmiento, "the post-mortem analyses detected how the cerebral immune response, and fundamentally the microglia cells, were activated during the treatment, directing their attack against the tumor cells and thus facilitating the tumor's complete elimination".

The data obtained are a ray of hope for the treatment of patients with this type of tumor, since, regardless of the success of the new anticancer drugs, their efficacy in the central nervous system is currently minimal, largely due to their difficulty in reaching the cancer cells located inside the brain.

Another clinical trial (NCT04587830) also focused on another specific type of glioblastoma patient, studying the use of the same drug and whose results are proving to be very promising. The drug did not manifest side effects in the patients involved in said trial.

Source-Medindia