NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[Lykiri]

Published: 04 August 2023

New trends in brain tumor immunity with the opportunities of lymph nodes targeted drug delivery.

Yangzhi Qi, Wei Xiong, Qianxue Chen, Zhifei Ye, Cailei Jiang, Yan He & Qingsong Ye

lymph nodes (LNs)

Notably, a new tumor vaccine using dendritic cells (DCs) as carriers to target LNs to activate peripheral immunity, DCVax-L vaccine, has significantly improved patients’ overall survival in both newly diagnosed and recurrent GBM according to a recent phase 3 clinical trial, which has never been achieved in any other comparative immunotherapeutic strategies

In cancer, vaccines are also considered as important components of immunotherapy besides ICB and CAR-T. It is worth noting that DCVax-L vaccine (NCT00045968) [9, 42], an autologous tumor lysate-loaded DCs vaccine, has significantly improve patients’ overall survival in both newly diagnosed and recurrent GBM in a recent phase 3 clinical trial. This is a breakthrough in immunotherapeutic strategy in the last decade. The success of DCVax-L indicates that the presentation of individualized patients-derived tumor neoantigens by DCs to T cells might be a crucial step to activate patients’ immunity. Moreover, in consideration of the large amount of DCs and naive T cells in LNs, targeted delivery of tumor neoantigens to LNs to directly activate the immune response appears to be promising with a wide range of applications (Fig. 3).

Nowadays, HybriCell and CreaVax-RCC have been approved for clinical practice, and a number of other DCs vaccines are in the stage of clinical trials. Among them, the DCVax-L vaccine is the most noticeable one since it significantly improves patients’ overall survival in both newly diagnosed and recurrent GBM in a recent study, which was the only one phase 3 clinical trial with a positive result ever reported in brain tumor immunotherapy [9, 42]. The success of DCVax-L highlights the broad applications foreground for LNs targeted vaccines in tumor therapy.

The success of DCVax-L [9] triggered our thinking about the failure of CAR-T: whether there are sufficient amount of T cells in the periphery is not important, and it is important how many of them are able to enter the tumor microenvironment.

https://jnanobiotechnology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12951-023-02011-0