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Annual Symposium 2015 | Michael Pearlman, MD, Ph.D | Advances in Glioblastoma Treatment


AVII made an excellent find (in the interests of staying balanced) that I think many of you will find very encouraging.

This is a video of a recent presentation by Michael Pearlman, M.D., Ph.D. on October 10, 2015.

Dr. Perlman is the Principal Investigator for DCVax-L at the Colorado Neurological Institute. His site is also included in the Expanded Access Protocol trial... so chances are he's following quite a few DCVax-L patients.

I've transcribed his presentation that first covers Rindopepimut, then his very encouraging RECENT words about DCVax. He doesn't mention the exact name - I wonder if that is because they haven't released their results yet? But you know it's DCVax-L. And then he wraps up with one sentence on ICT-107. I thought I'd include the portion about Rindo because it's relevant; and frankly, he seems much more impressed with DCVax-L.

Michael Pealman, M.D., Boulder Neurosurgical Associates
Current Techniques in the Treatment of Cranial and Spine Disorders) in Broomfield, Colorado, USA on Saturday, October 10th 2015.

Minute 17:20
So but what is all the rage? All the rage is vaccines. Vaccines and immunotherapy. Most of you probably heard in the news, 60 Minutes, about two or three months ago, there was a polio vaccine at Duke that was in the news. And there’s just been lots of immunotherapies that have been in the news recently.

So a lot of this stuff is predicated on melanoma and other cancers where they’ve had success in vaccines prior. So what I want to talk about is one of the newer vaccines. This is called CVX-110 and it targets specifically EGFRv3 mutation. So it’s about 30 to 40% of brain tumors. It’s actually shown a fair bit of promise. And it’s name is Rindopepimut but for my sake, I just call it CVX-110. And it’s basically a bunch of peptides that are relevant to EGFRv3 Glioblastomas. And what they’ve done is they went to the bottom of the floor of the ocean and found this sea animal. And this sea animal is called a keyhole limpet. A keyhole limpet is basically just a gigantic sea urchin. That’s basically what you can think of it as. And they use that to stir up the immune system and then they used this peptide sequence to target the immune system. So in a phase two trial with 65 patients, the overall survival went from 12 to 14 months to 24 months. That math is significant. You’ve doubled overall survival. The problem with it is it’s only limited to people with that mutation. But we’re getting specific now. The patient has this kind of mutation and we can produce a vaccine to target that mutation and produce some results.

Minute 19:13
So the next vaccine that is REALLY encouraging is called a dendritic cell vaccine. Now dendritic cells are a part of your immune system, they’re a kind of white blood cell that has been shown that you can prime to target a certain peptide or molecule. So in a Phase 2 trial, this kind of vaccine has demonstrated a tripling of overall survival. Okay so what is it targeting? How does it do that? Well the reality is that it doesn’t target a specific mutation that we can put a finger on. What the neurosurgeon does is… the patient comes in the ER, neurosurgery is called, imaging is done, and they say, hey, this patient has a brain tumor. They need surgery. Let’s get him in the OR. So we have a clinical trial down south which upfront, follows that exact scenario and the patient is brought into the OR [operating room]. The neurosurgeon goes in and says I’m going to take this tissue and I’m going to send if off to the headquarters. We’re going to chop it up, and we’re going to send... after the patient is done being in the hospital... we’re going to send them for leukapheresis. We’re going to take out their white blood cells. And those white blood cells are then pheresed, the dendritic cells are sent off to headquarters. And eight weeks later, after growing these two things up, the patient has his own personalized vaccine. It has shown a tripling of overall survival. [HELLO?] So, and it makes sense, hey I’m going to use my own tissue, my own brain tumor to develop my own vaccine.

Dendritic cells may be targeting things we don’t understand. But, it’s still producing results. Significant results. [Attencion!] This vaccine is now being used down at MD Anderson, and across the country in other kinds of tumors and showing similar types of results.

So there is more dendritic cell vaccines out there. There’s a vaccine out there that is based on dendritic cells - ICT-107. It is again using the patient’s own dendritic cells, but it’s targeting specific antigens manufactured by the company.

Thank you to AVII for providing us with some balance on IV. :) And as he points out, it doesn't seem that Dr. Pearlman is worried about any safety issues as of October 10. WHY? Because there aren't any. And while some seem to think that the treatment patients will perform similarly to the control patients (or even worse)... it would seem that Dr. Pearlman, an actual principal investigator in the trial, DOES NOT.