When it comes to treating cancer, immunotherapy has been a game-changer. It’s helped to slow down, or even wipe out, some types of cancer like skin cancer that often spreads to the brain.
However, it hasn’t been effective in treating glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer. A study led by UCLA researchers is getting closer to understanding why this is the case.
Different Responses to Immunotherapy in Brain Tumors
The treatment used in this study is a kind of immunotherapy called “immune checkpoint blockade.”
For some tumors that started somewhere else but spread to the brain, this treatment gets the immune system’s T cells ready to attack the cancer cells.
But the same thing doesn’t happen for glioblastoma, a cancer that starts in the brain itself.
Why? It turns out that the immune system’s T cells get their ‘marching orders’ to attack cancer cells from places outside the brain called lymph nodes.
And for reasons not yet fully understood, this process doesn’t work well for glioblastoma.
Taking a Closer Look at Immune Cells
The research team compared immune cells from people with different types of brain tumors. Nine people had tumors that had spread to the brain and were treated with immune checkpoint blockade.
The immune cells from these patients were then compared to those from 19 people with similar tumors who hadn’t received this treatment.
To get a closer look, the researchers used a technique called single-cell RNA sequencing to study the genetic material in these cells.
They also compared these findings to previous studies on glioblastoma. This helped them understand how the treatment was affecting the T cells.
What they found was quite telling: the T cells in the tumors that had spread to the brain were more prepared to fight off the cancer compared to those in glioblastoma cases.
A Potential New Path for Treatment
The study not only found differences in how T cells respond to the tumors, but it also showed that a specific group of tired-out T cells was linked to longer survival for people whose cancer had spread to the brain.
According to Robert Prins, the study’s senior author, this could mean that “improving the activation and function of T cells could be a potential new treatment strategy.”
What’s Next?
The research team aims to study a larger, more specific group of people whose skin cancer has spread to the brain.
The goal is to better understand how to make immunotherapy more effective for different kinds of brain tumors.
This research is important because it could help doctors and researchers develop better treatments for brain cancers, including the hard-to-treat glioblastoma.
By understanding why some tumors respond to current treatments and others don’t, we’re one step closer to helping people who are affected by these challenging conditions.
The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
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