I read somewhere recently that non-solid tumor lymph/blood cancers were showing even more complete responses to various forms of immunotherapy. Your post would be one of those cases.
It makes me think about DCVAX-Direct applicability to blood and lymph non-solid tumor cancer.
At first, it does not make sense to utilize dendritic therapy that is specifically delivered into the tumor (aka: intratumoral injection).
However, I think; just as some of us expect DCVAX-L will be made more potent in the future -- through DCVAX direct preparation advancements that occurred after the phase I-III tDCVAX-L trials were already in progress -- conversely, I think; DCVAX-Direct administration techniques will be used to expand its therapeutic range to blood cancers.
How could this be done? Most likely most of you nonscientists, and many other scientists have or will determine a better way then I will propose here, but I'll suggest one avenue.
First, it is a given that DCVAX-direct supercharges a precursor dendritic cell into the perfect phase of maturity. In the next stage of preparation, NWBO next takes the "teenage" dendritic cell set and concentrates it by selecting only the types previously determined to be most efficacious.
At this point you have highly efficacious, nontoxic and highly mobile dendritic cells ready for intratumoral injection.
But wait…in cancers like leukemia, there are no solid tumors to inject. What do you do?
The same blood sample that was used to gather, mature and select precursor cells into DCVAX-Direct -- that same blood sample -- would also contain leukemia cells.
While the DCVAX-Direct is being processed from part of the extracted blood, another part of the blood sample could be used to concentrate leukemia cells. Unlike the DCVAX-L process, these cells would not be ground up, but rather they would be stressed ex vivo. The stressing process might take the form of hyperthermia such that some leukemia cells would die while others would become too weak to mount a defense. Finally there may still be a few leukemia cells that can mount a full defense.
Into this concentrated blood sample of stressed leukemia cells we than introduce DCVAX-Direct dendritic cels. The timing of the commingling phase before reintroduction into the body would likely be critical. I say this because apparently dendritic cells appear to be only fully actualized if they are exposed to natural environmental conditions as well.
To do this, you probably do not want every single reinjected dendritic cells to be fully educated ex vivo, therefore there may be a perfect educational phase-time at which these dendritic cells are frozen or simply immediately reintroduced into the patient. This may dependent on the geographical location of the process in relationship to the patient's location.
Homely Analogy:
We learned that dendritic mobility, orientation, uptake, expression and other factors can and will be affected by their environmental circumstances during education, therefore I submit that it would behoove scientists to use the above technique to enhance the probability that dendritic cells will not all be exactly educated at the same time and place. This subtle, but to me, very profound pool of "olympic dendritic cells" trained in different environmental "countries," some even trained on home "turf" all by different "training techniques" will provide the ultimate "closing ceremonies."
