New vaccine triggers immune system against brain tumor

During the trail which involved 27 children with gliomas each patient received serial doses of a vaccine with peptides for glioma-associated antigen (GAA), which stimulates an immune response to a protein fragment present on their tumor cells Press TV reported.

After the treatment, four children showed rapidly progressive disease, 14 had stable disease for more than three months, three had sustained partial responses and one had prolonged disease-free status after surgery, researchers said at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in Chicago.

“We've found that the vaccine is tolerated well with limited systemic toxicity, but we've also observed that there are some patients who have immunological responses to the vaccine target in the brain that can cause swelling and transient worsening, and subsequently, some of those children can have very favorable responses,” said senior author Dr. Ian Pollack of the University of Pittsburgh.

“We've also demonstrated immunological responses in the majority of the kids.”

Funded by the US National Institutes of Health, the study was the first of its type that examined peptide vaccine therapy for children with brain tumors like gliomas, Pollack added.

“The fact that we’ve seen tumor shrinkage in children with very high-risk tumors has been extremely encouraging and somewhat surprising.”