NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[Doktornolittle]

This 2013 article addresses many of the questions that I have been struggling with today. I will probably forget all this and post the same chart next year... but today I will see clearly. Of course other data is available from other articles, but I am happy to accept all this info as the real deal.

Article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4347445/
KeyChart: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4347445/figure/F1/

Putting info together from throughout the article and the chart:


% GBM methylated: 40%
Methylated GBM survival advantage with TMZ vs w/o TMZ: 6.4 months.
Unmethylated GBM survival advantage with TMZ vs w/o: 1 month.

Chart states that mesenchymal is predominantly unmethylated.
So... I would argue that the mesenchymals would do better without TMZ when an immunotherapy is being used since TMZ weakens the immune system, at least temporarily.

Maybe the DCVax-L protocol adresses this fully, maybe not.

I think I understood LL saying that this issue is not understood well enough to risk stopping TMZ (from the beginning) for ie mesenchymals. But realize trial protocol was setup a long time ago, and to some extent she may be defending that protocol. It could be in the end that tumor heterogeneity begs the use of TMZ even for mesenchymals, neural and classical types, all of which are predominantly unmethylated according to the above chart, but I think that has yet to be seen.

I am just saying at this point that it seems likely that however effective DCVax-L turns out to be for mesenchymals, it will likely prove to be even more effective when TMZ is dropped. Likely, not certainly.