Vaccination in the immunotherapy of glioblastoma

Abstract

Glioblastoma remains one of the most common central nervous system tumors with an extremely poor prognosis. Recently, rapid progress in immunotherapy has provided new options for the treatment of glioblastoma. Vaccination, the primary method of immunotherapy, stimulates the body's tumor-specific immune response by the injection of foreign antigens. Peptide vaccines involve the injection of tumor-specific antigens, such as EGFRvIII or heat-shock proteins. Cell-based vaccines, which primarily include dendritic cell vaccines and tumor cell vaccines, involve injections of ex vivo-modified cells. Despite the encouraging results of phase I/II clinical trials, no successful phase III clinical trials involving glioblastoma immunotherapy, including glioblastoma vaccinations, have been reported to date. In this review, the authors summarize the published outcomes of glioblastoma vaccine therapy, explore its future prospects based on ongoing clinical trials, and discuss combined therapy as a future direction for glioblastoma treatment.

Phase II study of ERC1671 plus bevacizumab versus bevacizumab plus placebo in recurrent glioblastoma: interim results and correlations with CD4 + T-lymphocyte counts

“…The rationale underlying the ERC1671 vaccine is to evoke an oligoclonal and partly allo-specific immune induction, based on the use of a broad set of tumor antigens derived from freshly resected GBM tumor tissues from patient and three unrelated donors. This broad antigen-based approach differs from many other currently ongoing attempts at developing a tumor vaccine, some of which zero in on one or only a few individual, more or less tumor-specific targets, such as SurVaxM (aimed at surviving) or rindopepimut, a peptide vaccine aimed at the EGFR deletion mutation EGFRvIII [ 36 , 37 ].…”

Recent Advances in Immune Cell Therapy for Glioblastoma

“…The production of DC vaccines includes isolating DCs from patients, loading the cells with tumor antigens, culturing the DCs with cytokines to induce maturation, and reinjecting the cells back into the body (43). At present, vaccines are broadly divided into three categories according to different antigens: tumorassociated antigens (TAAs), tumor-specific antigens (TSAs), and tumor lysates (44 (43). TSA-based DC vaccines may generate an intense targeted inflammatory response against tumor cells while avoiding potential autoimmune responses in other tissues (44).…”

Introduction to immunotherapy for brain tumor patients: challenges and future perspectives

“…Vaccines aim to stimulate an intrinsic immune response to the tumor, with the primary goal of increasing effector cell activation and infiltration. There are a wide variety of vaccine approaches that are currently being evaluated in GBM, but they can be fundamentally categorized into two classes: peptide/DNA vaccines, and cell-based vaccines 19 . Of all current immunotherapies for GBM, vaccines have been one of the most thoroughly investigated strategies to date.…”