So if you look at what the car-t people did (which didn’t help survival but gave transitory (very temporary tumor regression) response.
they
1. Initially experimented with car-t to target egfrviii. The question is why? There are so many ways to do this cheaper, and either way, it doesn’t help survival.
2. Next, they tried to improve it by still targeting egfrviii, but also targeted normal cells that have normal egfr wildtype. At least we know why they used car-t for this part. It’s because the human immune system would not allow it, nor would DCVax-l, because our immune systems are evolutionarily designed not to attack normal cells. Car-t is useful only if it attacks what our body would not attack — if necessary. The trick is, what will it do to all the normal cells in the body, will it actually help stop the cancer, and what durability.
Let’s skip safety considerations for now. What we do know is normal egfr wildtype cells do not promote insane tumor growth like the variant egfrviii. We know that even getting rid of egfrviii and egfr wildtype, provides no durability as a monotherapy.
It’s therefore incredibly expensive as an adjuvant, but they could make it less expensive by simply targeting egfr wildtype (normal cells) and then run a trial to see if it could help DCVax-l. I sorta doubt it would help, but DCVax-l doesn’t attack normal cells, and since GBM has “normal” egfr often expressed as well as mutated, it might help DCVax-l do something it couldn't otherwise do.
However, again I haven't even gone into safety considerations, cost, and finally what Dr. Prins tried to teach the public a while back.
That is, it’s not the silver bullet antigen you must target when fighting heterogeneous solid tumor cancer, it is a quantitative solution. In other words, you must get all or as many cancer antigens as you can, because what we’ve learned from the hallmarks of cancer is that once it rears its ugly head, it has already developed many ways to duck a suppressed immune system.
Or as Senti might put it, you don’t take a rifle to a machine gun fight.
Finally, just a response to your stem cell point, and that is, yeah, sometimes what I analogize as dormant seeds that flower again once whatever therapy is gone, and certainly, that’s a problem, but with a vigilant and broad spectrum trained by DCVax-l, you have generational memory that recognizes those cancer cells when the seeds bud out. And because DCVax-l is not toxic, you can also indefinitely boost that memory with guardian vaccinations.
