Current Vaccine Trials in Glioblastoma: A Review

Abstract

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common primary brain tumor, and despite aggressive therapy with surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, average survival remains at about 1.5 years. The highly infiltrative and invasive nature of GBM requires that alternative treatments for this disease be widespread and targeted to tumor cells. Immunotherapy in the form of tumor vaccines has the potential to meet this need. Vaccines against GBM hold the promise of triggering specific and systemic antitumor immune responses that may be the key to eradicating this unrelenting cancer. In this review, we will discuss past and present clinical trials of various GBM vaccines and their potential impact on the future care of GBM patients. There have been many promising phase I and phase II GBM vaccine studies that have led to ongoing and upcoming phase III trials. If the results of these randomized trials show a survival benefit, immunotherapy will become a standard part of the treatment of this devastating disease.

Glia to glioma: A wrathful journey

“…Joining all these criteria, vaccine trials have been made against glioblastoma with its antigenic targets such as epidermal growth factor receptor variant 3 (eGFrvIII), glioblastoma stem cells or oncoproteins of cytomegalo virus and are achieved through the procurement of tumor lysate from resected GBM or through the synthetically formed protein cocktail of effective oncoproteins [150][151][152][153] . Some great review works by Oh et al and Xu et al are quite capable to avail information on glioblastoma vaccine trials [154,155] .…”

Bradykinin increased the permeability of BTB via NOS/NO/ZONAB-mediating down-regulation of claudin-5 and occludin

“…Glioma is the most common tumor in central nervous system (CNS) in adults [1]. Treatments for glioma include surgical resection followed by radiotherapy and chemotherapy which is assuming an increasingly important role in the treatment [2].…”

Glioblastoma antigen discovery—foundations for immunotherapy

“…Ten antigens known to be highly expressed in GBM, absent or extremely limited in expression in healthy tissues, and implicated in GBM development [44]. The findings from this study have been translated to a multipeptide vaccine which is under investigation in a phase I clinical trial [2].…”

“…Central to clinicallymeaningful immunotherapy is the development and discovery of tumor-associated antigens (TAA) that are both highly sensitive and specific for GBM [2,3]. TAAs expressed in GBM can be classified into three categories based on their expression pattern: (i) TAAs resulting from mutations or other genetic variations, (ii) TAAs encoded by overexpressed genes in GBM, and (iii) viral TAAs.…”