New CAR-T therapy shows promise against deadliest brain cancer

London: A pioneering therapy could one day be used to treat glioblastoma, the deadliest and most aggressive form of brain cancer, giving hope to patients with few other treatment options.

Scientists said this week that CAR-T cell therapy — a treatment that engineers a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and attack cancer — successfully eliminated glioblastoma tumors in preclinical models, including those grown from human patient tumors.

Glioblastoma is notoriously difficult to treat because it spreads rapidly and co-opts the immune system to help it grow and resist therapy. Survival rates remain poor with current treatments.

The new study suggests CAR-T could work differently by targeting both the tumor and the immune environment that supports it.“Instead of treating glioblastoma as only a mass of cancer cells, we need to think of it as a connected tumour-immune ecosystem,” said lead author Sheila Singh, professor of neuro-oncology at King’s College London. “Our approach targets both the tumour and the environment that allows it to thrive.

”Researchers said the findings “introduce a new treatment paradigm” for the cancer. The team cautioned that more work is needed before CAR-T therapy can move to clinical trials for glioblastoma.