Using the immune system to target and destroy blood vessels feeding aggressive brain tumours
Chief Investigator: Professor Michael P. Brown (Centre for Cancer Biology, South Australia)
Co-Researcher(s): Professor Bryan Day (QIMR Berghofer), Dr Lisa Ebert, Dr Stanley (Wenbo) Yu, Professor Stuart Pitson
Project Summary
A patient’s own immune system can be used to target and destroy the blood vessels that aggressive brain tumours like glioblastoma depend on to grow and survive.
Professor Michael Brown’s team has devised a new way to target two cell surface molecules on the blood vessels that feed brain tumours.
Based on chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy, which his team already has in clinical trials for adult and paediatric brain tumour patients, the team is advancing this CAR-T cell therapy so that it can also target these two molecules.
Project Progress:
Toward developing a new treatment approach for aggressive brain cancers, the team has shown first that the CAR-T cells can secrete new kinds of proteins, which fix on the cell surface molecules, and which bring with them killer T cells.
As a result, these killer T cells can kill more tumour cells than would have been possible with the CAR-T cells alone.
The next step is to test the protein-secreting CAR-T cells in brain tumour models already in use in their laboratories. This information is needed to plan for clinical trials.
