Study may offer new brain-tumour treatment
Malignant gliomas are common brain tumours for which no curative treatment yet exists. Now, in a multidisciplinary collaboration, Anna Dimberg’s research group has obtained data that suggest a completely new strategy to enable immunotherapy for brain tumours. The project was recently awarded SEK 31.5 million by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW).
“This is incredibly exciting. We’ve discovered there’s a way to train T cells close to brain tumours, and we want to develop a new kind of immunotherapy that can make brain-tumour treatment possible. So far, we’ve been researching basic cellular mechanisms in mouse models, and now we want to find a reliable form of treatment that can also work in humans,” says research leader Anna Dimberg, Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University’s Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology.
Most people affected by malignant brain tumours have gliomas. Recently, immunotherapy has come to the fore as a way of treating several types of cancer, but it is not yet effective for brain tumours. One reason for this is that since the brain is largely protected against infiltration of immune cells, the immune system is poor at recognising the malignant glioma cells.
Multidisciplinary initiative
Finding a solution to this problem is the aim of Dimberg’s project, which she runs in multidisciplinary collaboration with research colleagues in immunotherapy, neuro-oncology and vascular biology. The idea is that inducing tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS), which resemble lymph nodes, adjacent to the brain tumour will help the immune cells recognise the tumour.
“It’s like training the T cells in what the tumour looks like; and the training needs to be in the right place. TLS haven’t been described in brain tumours before, but we’ve got exciting new data showing that they can form in glioblastomas if essential factors are produced in the tumour,” Dimberg says.
Promising models
Previously, her colleague Magnus Essand’s research group has shown that the SFV4GBM virus can penetrate the brain and selectively kill tumour cells. By further developing SFV4GBM, the researchers will induce TLS in close proximity to the brain tumour. This increases the immune cells’ ability to recognise the tumour, improves the microenvironment for an effective immune response and boosts the recruitment of new immune cells from the circulation.
“Our results from preclinical models are very promising, and we have high hopes of being able to pass this on to clinics in the long term,” says Anna Dimberg.
Elin Bäckström